Case
management is popular today as many processes are already in place to handle
repetitive work leaving most of the remaining work, about 70%, as unstructured
or emergent and hard to put into a crisp process even if the process has some
adaptability capabilities. The real value of case management is for work that
requires collaboration and various types or levels of knowledge. Cases
typically run longer than straight through processes because multiple skill-sets
and knowledge bases are necessary to call a case complete. While individual activities can act in
parallel, eventually completion requires multiple parties.Typically the kind of
cases that are seen in organizations today fall into five key major categories,
but there are variants.
Service
Request Cases
Investigative
Focused Cases
Incident
Focused Cases
Decision
Intensive Cases
Hybrid
Cases
Case Management
Encourages Knowledge Collaboration for Goal Attainment
Case management, particularly adaptive case
management, enables knowledge worker collaboration to reach evolving goals as a
team. This is needed because work, cases in particular, have become more
complex and perfect knowledge is not available in one job role or person to
handle a case. There are five kinds of collaboration that I have observed in my
work life and are enumerated below
Unstructured
Communication:
Most collaboration happens in things like social media, email and through
texts. While this gets the job done, sometimes, it doesn't get captured for
reuse and future leverage. If we are working together to reach today's goals
and really don't intend to help others downstream, this is a great approach.
However, in the interest of capturing gems of wisdom, there are additional
approaches.
Enabled Conferencing:
Quite often one to one communications, captured or not, are not up to the task
of solving complex and complicated cases. This often requires "brain
storming" in a group fashion to "noodle through" difficult,
event patterns, decisions and appropriate actions in a speedy fashion. This may
require "in person", audio and video conferencing where content
(images, voice, image and video) can be shared in a
cooperative understanding session. This helps understanding the semantics, semiotics and dimensions
of complex work, agree on actions and glean cooperative commitment to the solution.
Coordinated Activity:
While independent activity such as communication and conferencing can solve
complex cases, the process is quite haphazard in attaining goals. If this goals
are coordinated and driven to in a milestone fashion with proper recording of
activity and history, there can be value carried forward for future cases and
patterns of success. This is especially true when the milestones are not carved
in stone and they can flex as cases progress. This where adaptive case
management leverages a technical assist.
Leveraging Community:
Often organizations are only focused on the resources that they directly
control with salary and employment contracts. While there is some sense in this
practice, sometimes cases need to tap into worlds that the organizations do not
have the knowledge or skill. Even if the organization has all the knowledge and
resources, they may not have the bandwidth to handle the work. This where
stringers, communities and public cognitive surplus can be leveraged to the
advantage of case resolution and positive organizational outcomes. This
approach usually interjects a new level of security and responsibility,
however.
Better Practice Guidance:
Often knowledge workers are left to their own experience and judgement as to
how to approach a case that may be growing in complexity over time. While it is
good to have experienced resources, there are assists that work for both the
uninitiated, the normal knowledge worker and the expert. Identifying better
practice patterns should be the goal of organizations where the work varies
greatly and the kind of cases are still emerging. By analyzing better practices
and rating results in the light of goal attainment can give your knowledge
workers several alternative paths for success. This could be at a large grained
level or as fine grained as to identify great collaborative patterns between
resources.
Organizations will need to practice all five of these collaboration approaches.
The wisest organizations will define when and where each style is used. As work
gets more complex and as processes aim for larger "end to end" scopes
there will be a mixture of knowledge work and routine process actions, so get
ready now for guiding these practices. Processes and cases share great visibility and accountability
for the work and all the work participants, case management allows for the
dynamic addition of participants and knowledge bases. Case management will also
track who is doing what work and track them to milestone events and final
completion. Most case management technologies allow for content sharing for
collaborations and the transfer of knowledge and data. In addition good case
management capabilities include the ability to track conformance and variance
to capture better practices, not just rigid best practices. Often case management styles can be
intermixed with crisp processes to create a hybrid.
It's pretty much a given
that large scoped, end to end, processes will contain a mixed set of process
styles, but it is not clear what style will dominate. Will it be case
management as the controlling style or will it be a typical flow. We know that
both kinds of processes have a start and a stop, but how they get from one to
the other is quite different. The Case approach follows a string of milestone
goals, with little concern for the sequence of steps to the reach each milestone.
The traditional flow has pre-planned paths and sequence implied in them. So why
would one dominate the other?
Where Case
Should Dominate:
Case should be the dominate style, with bits of
leveraged planned flows or snippets, when the basic goals around investigation
and collaboration to obtain high quality and consensus outcomes. The
further away a process is from best and tightened downed practice, the more
case makes sense. Over time certain bits of the interaction can be made into
min-flows (snippets), but investigative processes are generally dominated by
case.
Where Planned
Flows Should Dominate:
Flows should be the dominate style, with bits of
collaboration, when the basic goals are around speed and efficiency. The
further away a process is from evolving and emergent behavior, the more planned
flows make sense. As things become fuzzier and judgement intense, case and
collaboration can be interjected, but value and supply chains are generally
dominated by flow.
Net; Net:
A general rule of thumb is
that case is great for emergent work and process is great for repeatable work,
but both deliver great rates of return while they help case / process
participants organize and track their work to completion. I will be covering Smart
Process and Case Management Frameworks in future blog posts. My top ten key
players in Case Management are Newgen, Pegasystems, IBM, Appian, DST, Lexmark/Kofax, Tibco, OpenText, Micropact and Hyland today.
