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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally a vision for supporting Managers, Executives & others who plan as they do work, May 15, 2010
This review is from: Mastering the Unpredictable: How Adaptive Case Management Will Revolutionize the Way That Knowledge Workers Get Things Done (Paperback)
OK, full disclosure: I just finished writing this book and I am very pleased with it. Having started this rather blatant advertisement for the book, let me at least tell you what it is about. :-)
First and foremost, the book is about knowledge work. Peter Drucker defined this term to mean not just people who have a lot of knowledge (e.g. professors) or manage a lot of knowledge (e.g. librarians) but actually anyone who has a complex job to do that that is hard to define and that requires "experience" to do it. This includes police detectives, investigative reporters, judges, marketing managers, lawyers, doctors, nurses, rescue workers, financial advisers, entrepreneurs, and (most notably) managers and executives. Knowledge workers make up about 40% of the workforce, and growing.
The opposite of knowledge work is routine work. Routine work can be defined and predicted in a standard Scientific Management sense. The job is repeatable enough, that one can define a fairly fixed way to perform the job. For example, from the time a book is ordered on Amazon, to the time that the book is delivered to the customer, all of the work required is routine. You can write a fairly detailed plan of what exactly must be done, how to handle low stock situations, how to get it shipped, etc. in advance without having to know much at all about the specific book that will be ordered. There are exceptional cases, but 99.99% of all book can be handled with a standard process.
Most of the practice of management has focused on optimizing routine work: defining well designed work descriptions or process diagrams. Training people to do the job in a very repeatable way. Continually assessing the performance, and looking for ways to improve it.
In the past two decades we have seen a whole host of technologies (called workflow, business process management, etc.) to help support the automation or facilitation of routine work.
However, such techniques are not applicable for the unpredictable nature of knowledge work. The exact work that needs to be done for knowledge work depends very strongly on the situation. For example, the merger between United Airlines and Continental Airlines with have some things that need to be done that are unique to this particular merger, and that no other merger between companies will need. While there are patterns and similarities between mergers, you can't make a process diagram that represent (to any level of detail) exactly what has to be done for a merger, because every merger is different.
Knowledge workers are people who come to work without a well defined script for what they will be doing that day. Paramedics can not tell you how many emergencies they will handle in the coming day. Lawyers and judges can not tell you what the state of a case will be tomorrow. Product designers can not accurately estimate the number of design breakthroughs they will have in a period of time. Detectives can not tell you in advance everyplace they will need to visit in order to follow the trail of clues. All of these people "figure out" what they need to do, as they do it.
The book "Mastering the Unpredictable" is a collection of writings from 12 different experts in the field to discuss how knowledge work must be handled, and proposes capabilities that a technology would need to effectively support knowledge workers. Since you can't predict in advance exactly what will be done, you need to give people the ability to plan the work as they go along. This means that the planning can not be relegated to a highly specialized skill, but instead needs to be something that anyone and everyone can do.
"Mastering the Unpredictable" lays out a vision for how knowledge workers can use social networks, communications technology, document sharing, in order to be more effective at coordinating work using a collection of capabilities labeled "Adaptive Case Management" (ACM). ACM starts by giving workers a place to express their goals, and subgoals, and then manage those goals to completion. Goal orientation is one aspect of ACM, but you also need strong communications, records keeping, and document management. The purpose of ACM is not to constrain what a person can do at any time, but instead to put all possible actions within easy reach, so that the knowledge worker can execute quickly, responding to any situation as it comes up.
I hope that gives you an idea. Each of the contributors is passionate about the subject, and really try to give you a "glimpse over the hill" for this coming trend in both technology and management practice. More information is available at [...]
Mastering the Unpredictable: How Adaptive Case Management Will Revolutionize the Way That Knowledge Workers Get Things Done
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Business Processes as Unique Cases, July 13, 2010
This review is from: Mastering the Unpredictable: How Adaptive Case Management Will Revolutionize the Way That Knowledge Workers Get Things Done (Paperback)
For several years now, business process theorists have been concerned with describing the difference between processes that are more-or-less procedural in nature and slow to change and those processes that either change frequently, are very complex and difficult to describe, or both.
A good example of a procedural process that is slow to change is a production line situation where each assembly worker's job is precisely defined.
A good example of a complex, dynamic process is a process that generates proposals for major engineering undertakings. The process begins when the engineering firm receives a request for a bid. Someone at the firm analyzes the request to determine if the firm is even interested in bidding. Assuming the request is something the firm is interested in, a team is assembled to analyze the problem, design a solution and generate a bid. In the course of the project members of the team may send emails to colleagues around the world to find out about problems with similar jobs, to learn more about the needs of the company making the request, and to gather information about technologies that might be used. Similarly, there may be many meetings in which issues are argued out, solutions are discussed or the language of the final proposal is discussed. The proposal, when it is finally prepared and submitted may have characteristics in common with other proposals the engineering firm has submitted in the past, but it is also a unique response to a unique proposal. In other words, the response to the request was treated as a unique case. The approach and activities undertaken were adapted to the unique needs of the client and the skills of the team assembled to generate the proposal. And the entire effort was managed, at least in part, according to unique criteria associated with the specific request.
Historically, consulting firms have always used an approach more-or-less like the one just described. As other organizations offer more options and tailor to customer demands, they have also begun to introduce more flexibility into their processes. Similarly, as organizations rely more on knowledge workers who add value to services by refining them as they interact with customers, process analysts have been challenged to figure out how best to describe and specify improvements for complex, dynamic, knowledge-based processes. A variety of names have been proposed to describe these processes. Case Management has its roots in hospitals and insurance companies where the term reflects the idea that each patient's case needs to be considered as a unique case and that each insurance claim, is, so some extent, a unique case that needs to be carefully examined to determine which rules apply.
Theorists like Keith Harrison-Broninski have been discussing complex, dynamic processes for several years. The Object Management Group (OMG) began to discuss this type of process modeling problem in 2009 and has been using the term Case Management to describe the approach they are trying to define and standardize. I would prefer that they use something a little more descriptive, like "dynamic, complex processes," but can certainly use Case Management if that's what the community settles on.
Adaptive Case Management (ACM) describes an approach for capturing and automating the work that knowledge workers do. In essence, the authors propose a systematic approach for the description and capture of processes undertaken by knowledge workers - processes I would suggest range from a few hundred to a thousand rules.
Mastering the Unpredictable is a book of readings and the contributors include many people who have been involved in the OMG effort. As with any book of this type, some chapters are better than others. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 form the heart of the book and should be read by anyone interested in the future of BPMS and process automation.
The authors often contrast what they are recommending with BPM, which they say begins with and focuses on processes (procedural sequences) In essence, they are contrasting BPMS tools based on Enterprise Application Integration and older workflow approaches and their approach which depends on dynamic planning, "Tasks" ("templates") and rules.
Let's begin with the idea of tasks or templates, as these terms are used by the authors. A "case" is something that you want to accomplish. As the authors are using these terms, a process is a sequence. Each subprocess gets done in a specific order. A "task" is one or more activities that need to be accomplished to complete a case, but its use or its order can't be determined until we know the specific case. Thus, instead of a flow plan, the knowledge worker about to undertake the specific case considers a list of tasks and decides which he or she will use for this specific case, and in what order the tasks will be attempted. In other words, one of the first tasks in the case involved planning the tasks and tentative sequence for the specific case. Note that his places a limitation on automation - ACM applications are designed to support knowledge workers, not replace them. For any given case, only a subset of the tasks may be employed. The structure of the tasks themselves are largely based on the use of rules. The rules used, however, are mostly derived from knowledge workers, however, and not from organization policies.
Stepping back a bit, we are seeing an effort to reestablish some of the concepts used with expert systems development in the 80s. Instead of structuring the approach around a flow (procedural) we are going to structure the approach around knowledge concepts (data structures) and rules - a declarative approach. Our concern, in almost all the examples provided in the book, is not with accomplishing a task, but in reaching a decision or defining a solution. One might suggest that BPMS vendors began with procedural techniques, then begin to add rule-based techniques. Adaptive Case Management suggests how the rule-based techniques might take over and provide developers with tools that make it easier to model and automate knowledge structures and knowledge-based tasks.
This is an important book. It does not provide the kinds of concrete examples one might like, with detailed discussions of how a specific set of cases might be processed, but hopefully that will come in a subsequent volume. What this book does is define the fundamentals that might be used to develop what I think of as rule-based or agile workflow systems.
This is a significant step beyond the more or less independent business rule approaches that have been popular in the last decade and represents a return to knowledge-based techniques that predominated in the Eighties. It is a direct result of some very serious thought about how rule or knowledge-based techniques can be used to help model and automate complex, dynamic processes.
The contrast several authors set up between BPMS and their ACM approach is dramatic, but probably not as significant as they think. Lots of good enterprise work can be done with high-level processes that will be completely compatible with the use of ACM techniques at more detailed levels. ACM is not an alternative, but a set of tools that can be used on one set of problems that process analysts face.
I do not believe the techniques described in this book can be scaled to deal with really complex problems - for the same reason that expert systems failed - because the rule maintenance problems would be too expensive. I do believe, however, that the time is right to apply these techniques to extending BPMS tools for use with processes that include tasks that depend on knowledge. Moreover, as these applications illustrate, the tools only work if there are knowledge workers to plan each case and adjust the tasks and choose among the options offered by the ACM tools. In other words, we are always talking about a Decision Support tool here rather than a fully automated solution. Being stimulated to think about how this integrates with today's popular BPMS applications is worth the price of this book.
I recommend caution, however. This book will help you with cases that involve modest amounts of knowledge. It will not, however, prepare you to tackle the really hard or complex problems that would require thousands of rules. Those problems are still beyond what we can handle in a cost effective manner. You are better to hire a good CEO or a good enterprise architect than to focus on trying to define the processes he or she will use. But for many more modest knowledge-based jobs and processes, the approach recommended by ACM will probably work fine.
I strongly recommend this book. Others will come out with different ways of dealing with knowledge-based processes, but this is a very good start and suggests an approach that will certainly be rapidly developed in the year ahead. This book will not prepare you to build an Adaptive Case Management system, but it will certainly give you lots to think about.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Surpasses All Expectations, June 17, 2010
This review is from: Mastering the Unpredictable: How Adaptive Case Management Will Revolutionize the Way That Knowledge Workers Get Things Done (Paperback)
It is not enough to expect the unexpected - you need to be equipped to handle it on the fly - and make it a powerful competitive edge. Mastering the Unpredictable is the handbook of this emerging discipline, Adaptive Case Management (ACM).
If you cannot envision this, do not worry, your competition will soon show you ... in ways that will shake you.
Few books can come out about "game changers" at the beginning of an incrediblly valuable paradigm shift ... a shift which just might change everything. Of those, fewer still can be viewed months later, with acknowledment that they "Got it", and made it easy for others to "Get it".
This book does it right. I finished this book knowing:
* What I have to do to get ready to use ACM;
* When I must do it; and
* What I'll be facing if I do nothing.
The organization and presentation of material matches the underlying elements of ACM. The layout, and excellent tools (glossary, abbreviation list, introduction, index, etc.), support an exciting first read, and easy later referencing. The examples and situations described apply to roles at all levels of an org chart - from C-level to front line knowledge worker. This makes my job of 'change agent' easier since I do not have to make nearly as many translations to communicate with a wider group of coworkers.
In many ways, Mastering the Unpredictable is letting me manage the case of getting practical insights, and developing action plans for ACM use - applicable to all the various roles I play.
If task lists, or action plans are helpful to you, you will find it easy to extract points into lists like:
1. What are the pains of taking a wait-and-see attitude?
2. Using ACM expects various degrees of "MacGyver" attitude. What can be done in advance to prepare the culture, and get people aware?
3. What feature/benefit technologies are out there now, and what direction is it going?
4. What can I say to coworkers who don't think this applies to us?
I know that our work NEEDS adaptive case management - but we don't have a support system that's up to the task. I also know that we can embrace it early, or watch our competitors use it against us first, and that's scary.
Wouldn't you rather be the MacGyver player, than meet one who's trying to get your business? This roadmap will show you the way.
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