Metastorm BPM 7.6 development lessons

1.  %emailAddress() function returns only one email address.  so %emailAddress(user1, user2) returns nothing.  Use SQL Select to return multiple email address, parse out, and set to the To:.

Communication: Summarizing work done

When making final delivery of work done, summarize the work or change done in an email or for excel, a summary worksheet.

Project Management: working backwards

To figure out how to organize and drive a project to completion, it helps to start from the end and work backwards to figure out what is needed:

• People
  • Sponsor – your jungle guide to navigate the organization.  Partner with the sponsor to create a long term strategic plan as well as working on tactics to drive the project forward.
  • Stakeholders – people that are in position to make decision, help you move the project along
  • Noisemakers – people who are not in a position to decide but who can make a lot of noise and derail your efforts.  Need to placate the noisemakers where possible.
  • Develop stakeholder matrix
• Systems (and the people you need to access them)
  • Data
  • Integration
  • Messaging
• Milestones
  • Kickoff meeting
  • Status Update
  • Create a calendar of important dates to keep sponsor informed about the short term tactical maneuvers.
• Scripts
  • PowerPoint slides to talk through meeting

Metastorm BPM 9: audit trail

Since MBPM v9 and the stage captions that were introduced, I started writing a statement to give me an audit trail view that showed the stage name that the action went from and to, a fairly simple statement if only using the stage names, but a few extra cases to deal with when using the stage captions. Then I discovered there is now a view ‘evw_AuditTrail’ which already has this. Just saves a little time for new process designers and one less thing that we need a customized statement for.

http://communitycentral.metastorm.com/t5/Metastorm-BPM-Version-9/v9-audit-trail-view/m-p/939

Organisational Politics

When we talk about implementing BPM, we do so in a clean, clear and logical way. The only problem with that is every organisation has internal politics to deal with.

Sometimes the BPM system has been brought in to help sort out the mess.

Sometimes BPM is the one that causes the mess.

Everyone will tell you the right way to design a business process – is by designing it around the business procedure, not around people. But in real life you find that you need to “bend” the process around political obstacles.

http://adamdeane.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/bpm-organisational-politics/

Metastorm BPM Business Object Layer for ASP.NET web application

I have been thinking about writing an abstract layer for the Metastorm BPM ECL, but after doing some research at stack programmers, I feel that it is better to write the abstract layer when the need arises instead.

I believe, however, that it makes sense to create a Metastorm BPM business object layer in anticipation of future projects.

Wrapping a 3rd party API – Gateway Pattern connections

Make a connection class with a public constructor. It should initialize an instance of the 3rd party object as a private field. The connection class should have factory methods that call private constructors of your other wrapper classes, passing its instance of the 3rd party object as a parameter.

Communication: effective email

Be specific, drill down:
Instead of writing to ask someone to review a list of step in a process to see if it is complete and current, better to be specific about exactly what is mean by complete and current.

For instance, is the process missing steps, has obsolete steps, has revised steps, etc.

Default Option:

stack project management answer on handling non-responsive client

There are two ways I deal with non-response:

• default position which allow you to continue.
• meeting with a goal (default position)

This is because there are two main reasons they don’t respond.

Fear and lack of understanding.

Fear of commitment or more fear of making the wrong choice … Especially if their job is hanging in the balance, they will put it off as long as possible… Giving a default which is to continue forces them to focus and move on.

Lack of understanding … Most people aren’t developers, they can’t imagine the end result … So you have to help them through it.

Addition: Default position that allows you to continue

When ever you hand over a “please make a decision” document, you phase it more like:

“Here is the list of options (A, B, C), we are heading down path B, please let us know by Friday if this is incorrect”.

You can justify this by saying something like “in order to keep on the critical path we are going to make this assumption …”