This blog is my interview with Jonathan Sapir, who is
committed to bringing these worlds together with his technology
Work-Relay. Let’s dig into the premise
and find out the logic behind bringing these forces together.
Jim: Is the nature of
work changing and why?
Jonathan: The
virtualization of the workforce - where employee can work from anywhere - and
the virtualization of work - where work may be done by anyone, inside or
outside the organization - significantly increases the everyday problems all
organizations experience: things falling through the cracks, lag time between
tasks, and the lack of visibility over who is doing what when.
Jim: This means that
we have to manage transitions better, I assume?
All of these problems come down to work transition - work
transition is the silent killer of productivity of every organization. Like a
relay race, things quickly fall apart when the transition of the baton between
runners falters. In business, the point of transition is hard to see, so it
doesn’t get nearly enough attention. But with virtualization of work and the
workforce, effectively managing the transition of work becomes a critical
success factor.
Jim: This has always
been a problem, why such a big deal now?
Typical work transition questions include: How do I know
when you are done with your task so I can start mine? How do I know that you
completed everything you were supposed to do before I get it so I don’t have to
go back and forth to get what I need? How can I make the best decisions and
take the right actions if I don’t have all the context I need? How do I know
you are working on something, or if something is running late, without having
to call or email? It’s hard enough transitioning work successfully to the
person down the hall, but when that person works for another company, is
somewhere else in the world, and speaks a different language, successful
transitions are infinitely more complex.
Jim: The complexity
word pops up again. How can the combination of BPM & PM solve that?
I think there has always been an artificial barrier between
process management and project management. Project managers certainly have no
interest in learning BPMN to run their projects. But every project of course is
based on an implicit process, so if you are able to give project managers a way
to easily exploit the process explicitly, there is an enormous amount of
benefit to be gained. So while the benefit of having a time dimension for
recurring processes is useful in being able to proactively manage resources and
possible bottlenecks, it becomes extremely beneficial for unique processes -
which are in effect projects.
Jim: So process
management manages the resources and project management manages the dynamics of
time?
Yes. This combination will help organizations to focus much
more attention on work transitions. They need to put in place a simple way to
transition work between people inside and outside the organizations, between
people and systems, and increasingly, between people and “things”.
Successful transition includes:
●
End-to-end visibility over who is doing what, in
real-time, reducing the need for status meetings, and increasing the ability to
preempt possible problems.
●
A common medium through which everyone involved
can communicate, including external participants.
●
The ability to easily collaborate at transition
points, where context is readily available.
●
A clear understanding of what is required to be
done before the work transition can take place. Because of the short shelf life
of knowledge and the transient nature of workers, there has to be a way to
provide fresh packages of knowledge to workers when they need to get something
done. Includes context - be able to see conversations and decision made along
the way.
●
The ability to set monitoring thresholds so that
notification, reminders and escalations can be automated to reduce lag time
between transitions.
●
The ability to automate rules to reduce the
possibility of error when the transitions take place.
●
The ability for work to follow the worker. With
mobile, there is no longer some monolithic application to go to to take action
- applications are made up of many “mobile moments”, specific functionality
designed for specific users. The worker needs to be told when they need to do
something, and this notification needs to come with everything they need to do
complete the work - without having to go somewhere else.
Jim: So you decided
to build Work-Relay to support both?
Yes. A few years ago, my company built a custom system for a
fast food company that was installing a new point-of-sale systems in 6,000
stores across the country. This involved a complex process that required the
coordination of many different parties - employees, vendors, contractors,
franchises, training, etc. But there was also of course the need to schedule
things and allocate resources as needed. Was this a process or a project?
Clearly, both.
The reasons they ended up with a custom system because there
weren’t any off-the-shelf packages that could do what they needed. As the
application we built started to be used by other departments in the company, it
became clear that there was a place in the market for a product built from the
ground up to address both process and project management as equals. So we took
what we had learned and started building a package that could be used by
anyone.
Jim: So you decided to
build this on Salesforce?
I think it is virtually impossible today to create a product
with the scope of Work-Relay from scratch. Building your own infrastructure,
databases, networks, social, mobile, and keeping up with the rapid pace of
technological innovation just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Salesforce was
an obvious choice for us, since it provides all the functionality you need to
build - and run - your product out-the-box. And they have hundreds of thousands
of clients and millions of users, so they can afford to have the best
infrastructure, the best security, develop bleeding edge technology. This way,
we get to keep our focus solely on Work-Relay functionality, and users can be
assured that they have the power of salesforce.com to ensure availability,
performance, scalability – the list is long. And Work-Relay gets to take
immediate advantage of the continual stream of enhancements made to the
platform by Salesforce.
Jim: So this means you
get social, mobile, cloud & big data and other modern technical advantages,
but you are stuck if you are not a Saleforce client already?
Every Work-Relay user requires a Salesforce license of some
kind - like CRM, platform, community, Chatter. But organizations that don’t
already use Salesforce can purchase a version of Work-Relay that includes an
embedded Salesforce license. So the product is absolutely not restricted to
companies using Salesforce.
Jim: Sounds good in
theory. Who’s using it?
One of our early clients is one of the world’s largest
clinical research organizations. They run drug trials across the globe. They
have literally hundreds of projects running concurrently. The projects are
based on processes that include hundreds of steps and many levels of flows
within flows. The steps are executed over multiple years by a mixture of
employees, vendors, partners and contractors, and a change in one project can
impact many other projects. In this kind of environment, it is very difficult
to get complete visibility over all projects, and know, in real-time, who is
doing what when. This makes it extremely difficult to identify critical changes
and their impact across the projects. Work-Relay is providing them with this
kind of capability for the first time.
Jim: Is it generally
available and where can I find out more details?
We are in limited release mode until the end of the year. At
that point, anyone will be able to install it right from Appexchange and be up
and running building and deploying processes in minutes.
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