A revolutionary Idea for Business Process Modelling Software

A little over a year ago I was lucky enough to work with some incredible minds while working as an external BA consultant. We were working on a project for a local council and as we were told to fit into the office culture, we had a lot of obligatory coffee breaks and table tennis tournaments during work hours where we could contemplate business ideas together. I was able to catch up with one of those minds recently over coffee and he reminded me of why I enjoyed working with him so much (it wasn’t all about the ping pong). I feel I owe him a lot for the way he has shaped the way I think. If someone asked me to describe Phil in three words I would use visionary, innovative, ingenious.

 

In a single train ride to work we would come up with at least three business concepts which had the potential to work provided he had the resources and time to dedicate to it. He often had me telling him to keep his voice down so people didn’t steal his ideas and he would quickly reassure me that the primary school child sitting next to us probably had great respect for intellectual property. During our recent coffee he reminded me of one of the ideas we came up with which was a revolutionary idea to optimise business process modelling software to reduce duplicate work efforts. He informed me that a company with the resources to implement our idea is actually quite close to a competitive product (if ours was to exist) so I thought it would be a good time to tell you the story of how we came up with our pseudo product.

 

Our work primarily consisted of interviewing staff while modeling their roles and work procedures on the fly as we spoke to them using tablet PCs. We would freehand scribble our workflows using Ms OneNote and then later on get back to our workstations and re-do it into MEGA. This was tedious (not to mention time consuming) and everyone, especially me hated it as I was the one having to put everyone’s models into MEGA.  One day instead of just complaining and whining about how terrible our business process was for having me do repeat work, I decided to actually look for solutions to our problems.

 

I couldn’t really find anything out there but I knew what I wanted. I said - “Hey you know it would be so much easier if we had a tablet version of MEGA which could recognise the drawing of a box or triangle and auto-convert it to legitimate symbols for process modelling”. Everyone looked at me and said nothing for a while so I added…. “or a giant robot that went to work for me”? To which I got, hey that’s a really good idea. “What the robot?… I reckon”. Apparently the team liked the Tablet BPM software idea better than my robot one (unfortunate but I respect their opinion). Phil moved the whiteboard closer and started to do his brainstorming thing. At this point I realised he wasn’t being sarcastic and he was actually serious about pursuing this idea. He had Ray on his side already searching Google for appropriate SDKs to work off and before I knew what was happening I was being asked what else the software would do.

 

I thought, OK let’s play this game. I decided to start throwing around outrageous clown ideas for the software … “Maybe we can double tap on a box and give it a new level so say Bob goes to the toilet, we can then double-tap on the box and then give detail to his process in the toilet…. Bob takes a pee and then hopefully washes his hands. You see we need the further levels to add important details to our models. What if Bob didn’t wash his hands? We wouldn’t know without that extra level”.  I can still remember everyone maintaining a serious business face. It is inspiring now but at the time it seemed that I was the only one who got my joke about fictional Bob.

 

I then complained a bit more about the fact that the current models don’t really demonstrate processes well. The imagination runs wild from a concise description of a process and one can easily translate a process to something totally wrong. “It would be good to have an animation mode like SIMS where we can play games of … say for example – make the process of cooking eggs visually. Set the foundation of objects like people, pans, eggs, time and allow different scenarios… if the egg drops, if I’m in the kitchen etc. (I must admit I got this idea from having endless fun with packet tracer during University. The lecturers were quite impressed with how much time I spent with that software but it was only because I loved the animation of packets traversing the internet through pipes. That was better than TV). It looked something like this:

 

Of course I have only revealed the initial ideas which triggered our extensive product concept. With the help of Ray who is a genius software developer and Phil who knows the ins and outs of business marketing we finetuned my less than ambitious initial ideas into a worthwhile concept for BPM software which would change the face of Business Process Improvement and tablet PCs. We took it as far as considering networking with tablet PC suppliers and resellers in hope for collaboration as well as liaising with investors. The only thing that stopped us was me leaving the project early for a new job…wow I guess you could blame me for not letting our idea get off the ground.

 

I have some exciting news for this web site too….wait for it… I have gone through negotiations with an amazing artist who is going to provide me her artwork which she has given me full permission to display on my site. I will create a dedicated page for her drawings. Trust me; I want each and every one of them on a t-shirt. They are amazing.