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Dynamic Case Management Pega Special Edition
by Don Schuerman, Ken Schwarz, and Bruce Williams Foreword by Eamonn Cheverton
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies®, Pega Special Edition Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River St. Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774 www.wiley.com Copyright © 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. Trademarks: Wiley, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, The Dummies Way, Dummies.com, Making Everything Easier, and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. Pega and the Pega logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Pegasystems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. LIMIT OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY: THE PUBLISHER AND THE AUTHOR MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS WORK AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. NO WARRANTY MAY BE CREATED OR EXTENDED BY SALES OR PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS. THE ADVICE AND STRATEGIES CONTAINED HEREIN MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR EVERY SITUATION. THIS WORK IS SOLD WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT THE PUBLISHER IS NOT ENGAGED IN RENDERING LEGAL, ACCOUNTING, OR OTHER PROFESSIONAL SERVICES. IF PROFESSIONAL ASSISTANCE IS REQUIRED, THE SERVICES OF A COMPETENT PROFESSIONAL PERSON SHOULD BE SOUGHT. NEITHER THE PUBLISHER NOR THE AUTHOR SHALL BE LIABLE FOR DAMAGES ARISING HEREFROM. THE FACT THAT AN ORGANIZATION OR WEBSITE IS REFERRED TO IN THIS WORK AS A CITATION AND/OR A POTENTIAL SOURCE OF FURTHER INFORMATION DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE AUTHOR OR THE PUBLISHER ENDORSES THE INFORMATION THE ORGANIZATION OR WEBSITE MAY PROVIDE OR RECOMMENDATIONS IT MAY MAKE. FURTHER, READERS SHOULD BE AWARE THAT INTERNET WEBSITES LISTED IN THIS WORK MAY HAVE CHANGED OR DISAPPEARED BETWEEN WHEN THIS WORK WAS WRITTEN AND WHEN IT IS READ. For general information on our other products and services, or how to create a custom For Dummies book for your business or organization, please contact our Business Development Department in the U.S. at 877-409-4177, contact
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Table of Contents Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 About This Book......................................................................... 1 Icons Used in This Book............................................................. 2 Beyond the Book......................................................................... 2
Chapter 1: Discovering DCM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 DCM Defined................................................................................ 3 Investigating the Case................................................................ 4 Managing the Details.................................................................. 6 Goal-driven DCM............................................................... 6 Detail-oriented DCM......................................................... 8 Silos Are for Farmers................................................................ 10 Dynamic Work for the Digital Age........................................... 11 Customer life cycle......................................................... 12 Work life cycle................................................................. 13 Where life cycles meet................................................... 13
Chapter 2: Getting Value from DCM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Keeping Customers Happy...................................................... 15 Knowing your customers............................................... 16 Connecting across channels......................................... 16 Adapting to the situation............................................... 17 Driving work to done...................................................... 18 Keeping promises........................................................... 20 Improving Efficiency................................................................. 20 Giving just enough information.................................... 21 Setting priorities............................................................. 21 Being social..................................................................... 21 Automating...................................................................... 22 Connecting to the Internet of Things........................... 23 Gaining operational visibility and control............................. 24 Rules and regulations..................................................... 24 Audits............................................................................... 25
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition Changing at the Pace of Market Demands............................. 25 Business–IT collaboration............................................. 26 Direct capture of objectives.......................................... 26 Business rules................................................................. 27 Design by doing.............................................................. 27 Repeatability and scale.................................................. 28
Chapter 3: Organizing Your Work for DCM. . . . . . . . . . . 31 Defining Case Types................................................................. 31 Knowing Where Your Parents and Children Are.................. 33 Managing complexity..................................................... 34 Working in parallel......................................................... 35 Adding children to a parent.......................................... 35 Breaking Cases into Work Stages............................................ 36 Meaningful stages........................................................... 36 Milestones as markers................................................... 37 Tasks and processes...................................................... 37 Service levels and deadlines......................................... 37 Alternative stages........................................................... 38 Resolution: The final stage............................................ 39 Thinking about Reuse............................................................... 39
Chapter 4: Get ting Case Work Done . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Seeing the Power of Automation............................................. 41 Getting the Data Right.............................................................. 42 Structured and unstructured business data............... 43 Systems of record........................................................... 44 Case metadata................................................................. 45 Automating with Processes..................................................... 46 Guiding with Rules and Analytics........................................... 47 Guided processing.......................................................... 48 DCM and Big Data........................................................... 48 Tracking the Unpredictable..................................................... 49
Chapter 5: Bringing DCM to the Enterprise . . . . . . . . . . 51 Selling DCM to Employees....................................................... 51 Understanding Roles and Responsibilities............................ 52 Business........................................................................... 52 IT team............................................................................. 53 Program governance...................................................... 54 Starting Small, Winning Fast.................................................... 55 Going over the waterfall................................................ 55 Staying agile..................................................................... 56
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Measuring and Improving........................................................ 57 Using the operational dashboard................................. 57 Targeting DCM improvements...................................... 58 Reusing, Customizing, and Repeating.................................... 59 Scaling Success......................................................................... 61
Chapter 6: DCM in Action. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 This Flight Is Not Delayed........................................................ 63 One Claim to Rule Them All..................................................... 64 Comfort and Confidence for the Elderly................................ 65 Citizen Case............................................................................... 66 Getting on Board....................................................................... 67 Keeping Patients Well............................................................... 68 Keeping Patients Satisfied....................................................... 68 How May I Help You?................................................................ 69
Chapter 7: Nine Best Practices of DCM . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Review Past Work..................................................................... 71 Get the Decision-Makers in the Room.................................... 71 Look at Work through Your Customers’ Eyes....................... 72 Report on Your Goals............................................................... 72 Act Project, Think Program..................................................... 73 Avoid Jargon.............................................................................. 73 Wrap and Renew....................................................................... 73 Think Digital.............................................................................. 74 Learn by Doing.......................................................................... 74
Chapter 8: Ten DCM Pitfalls to Avoid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Leaving Business Out of Design.............................................. 75 Not Getting Executive Support................................................ 76 Taking On Too Much................................................................ 76 Paving the Cow Paths............................................................... 76 Inviting Analysis Paralysis....................................................... 77 Losing Control of Change......................................................... 77 Not Being Agile.......................................................................... 77 Skimping on the Skills Budget................................................. 78 Underestimating Data Integration Challenges...................... 78 Ignoring Advice......................................................................... 78
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Appendix A: Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Blogs and Community Forums................................................ 79 Web Resources.......................................................................... 80 Books and eBooks..................................................................... 81 Conferences............................................................................... 81 Consultancies............................................................................ 82 Analysts...................................................................................... 83 Pega............................................................................................ 84 Other Technology Vendors..................................................... 84 Look Around You!..................................................................... 84
Appendix B: Glossar y. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
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Foreword
H
eathrow Airport, February 2008. As Enterprise Architect, I was tasked to source the next generation in Airport Sys tems for one of the world’s busiest airports, London Heathrow. The brief was to find systems that would help Heathrow become a proactively managed organization. I had trawled through all the current offerings within the aviation sector, but there was nothing available to meet the brief. I wanted a solution designed around reusable business services, a system that could adapt and respond to the events in a dynamic environment. These were the thoughts I had in my head while sitting in Heathrow Airport, awaiting a flight to the Gartner Business Process Management conference in Las Vegas. I had defined a Business Architecture and divided Heathrow into a set of abstracted capabilities. It was planned these capabilities would become our reusable system components going forward. What was now required was a solution to “plan, do, and review” these components. As I watched the aircraft land, get turned around, and depart, I had my Eureka moment: I was watching case management! The landing of aircraft could be understood as the opening of a case. The turnaround — getting the plane on to its next flight — is case management. And closing the case occurs when the aircraft departs. I had abstracted the capabilities and processes of the airport away from aviation and into the domain of commercial off-the-shelf systems. My optimism faded rapidly, though, as it appeared there was no toolset available to provide the support needed. Undeterred, I attended a conference lunch to hear Pega CEO Alan Trefler give a presentation on the execution gap. Finally, I could see some synergy between our needs and the software industry. But this view was not initially shared by the team from Pega. There was much skepticism in how a toolset proven in banking, healthcare and insurance could be of use to some airport far, far, away with no structured workflow. After many diagrams and some smoke and mirrors, I got Pega to understand just how suitable dynamic case management (DCM) was for managing aircraft operations. These materials are © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition On my return, I set up further meetings and arranged for a proof of concept to be built. The system had to be robust as the systems we had in mind were mission critical. It also had to be flexible for business users to change constraints to the systems without involving the IT department. Another benefit enabled Heathrow to move toward an adaptive approach to software development. Following on from the success of the proof of concept it was decided to use DCM as the method to deliver collaborative decision making (CDM) for Heathrow. CDM is a European initiative to encompass airports within the airspace network. For the first time, information would be shared among all stakeholders (airports, airlines, air traffic control, and ground handlers) in real time. All stakeholders would be able to see how the effect on one party’s actions would affect the others. The solution moved the airport from being integrated at a data level to being integrated at the process level — in real time. The airport now knows, with a high degree of accuracy, the time of arrival of an aircraft, allowing the efficient use of ground-based resources. To-the-minute monitoring of the aircraft turnaround on the ground allows accurate departure times to be forwarded to the network operator, resulting in a more balanced airflow of some of the world’s busiest airspace. Aircraft now push back from the stand at the optimum time. Aircraft now spend on average two minutes less time taxiing out to departure. This reduction results in a saving of millions of dollars to the airlines in fuel, and a reduction in noxious emissions in the thousands of millions of tons to the environment. Heathrow’s on-time depar ture rate has gone from 67 percent to 91 percent. This is a considerable feat when you consider that the runways operate at 97 percent capacity, 365 days a year, with a departure rate at 46 movements per hour per runway. Heathrow has been transformed by the adoption of DCM. Some were uncertain when we started our journey six years ago, but commitment to the practices outlined in this book helped ensure our success. Each and every day, airlines and passengers benefit from the improved communication, collaboration and response provided by DCM. Eamonn Cheverton Enterprise Architect, BAA-Heathrow London, May 2014
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Introduction
N
o matter what industry you’re in, your business has two types of work: predictable and unpredictable. Highly predictable work can be scripted and programmed, but unpredictable work requires quick thinking and constant decision-making. For decades, managing these different types of work has been a difficult and confusing task — generally involving two different management approaches. Traditional control methods, such as workflow and business process management (BPM), support predictable work. More recently, advances in what’s known as case management have helped address the less-predictable types of work. Today, however, you can use a single approach — dynamic case management (DCM) — to manage all the work in your organization. DCM engages people and technologies, allowing you to define work in terms of a resolution and then manage a collection of tasks to achieve the desired outcomes. It empowers people and systems to respond to events and make faster, better, more accurate decisions — allowing them to work more efficiently while also better serving customers. DCM represents a new level of maturity and sophistication in enterprise-class management — and enterprise-class software. Because it’s both goal- and detail-oriented, it encompasses both predictable and unpredictable tasks. In a world of increasing complexity, DCM provides simplicity.
About This Book Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition, is more than just an overview of DCM. It also covers the methodology’s business management and information technology aspects, and delves into the rules-driven foundation on which DCM is built. We wrote this book not only to help you understand DCM, but also to serve as a business reference while you practice
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition everyday DCM. Because the book covers the basics, it’s necessarily brief, so you’ll want to follow up on some of the areas that are most interesting or important to you (see “Beyond the Book” later in this introduction, and Appendix B, “References”).
Icons Used in This Book In the margins of this book, you see some helpful little icons that pinpoint particular types of information.
The Tip icon provides helpful details on implementing DCM successfully.
The Remember icon denotes key concepts that you should keep in mind.
The Technical Stuff icon indicates a technical item.
The Warning icon flags a risk or pitfall that could get you into trouble.
Beyond the Book Although this book is stuffed with information, we can only cover so much in 96 short pages! So, if you find yourself wanting more information about dynamic case management, just go to www.pega.com or www.dcm4dummies.com. There you can find more information about Pega, DCM, and how you can apply these capabilities to achieve new levels of business performance.
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Chapter 1
Discovering DCM In This Chapter ▶ Understanding cases ▶ Managing details in the context of outcomes ▶ Moving work across silos
L
ike most people who are new to dynamic case management (DCM), you probably have lots of questions. Exactly what is a case? How is DCM different from workflow or business process software? What does that whole dynamic thing mean? This chapter helps you find answers to those questions — and more.
DCM Defined DCM is about getting business work done. In this context, work means the tasks and activities people perform every day at organizations large and small. Work can be releasing a new product, setting up a new customer account, or helping a customer with a service request. Work is dynamic, driven by new situations, stimulated by new opportunities, and initiated by smart people who combine experience and intellect to invent better ways to get things done. DCM is a software-based approach to managing, improving, and ultimately automating work by helping people get that work done. DCM software allows business people to collaborate in real time with information technologists, which provides several benefits:
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✓ Business leaders gain more visibility into their operations, giving them the insights they need to increase productivity through simplification.
✓ Technologists and developers collaborate directly with business experts to deliver applications that enable their businesses to meet changing market demands.
✓ Customers and employees are better engaged and more empowered by systems that perform the heavy lifting without boxing them into rigid processes that don’t fit their needs.
✓ The enterprise can quickly scale from pilot to enterprise transformation through the reuse of technology assets and best practices. The journey is well worth your while. It makes employees more productive and also raises customer satisfaction. DCM truly is a better way to get work done.
Investigating the Case The core of DCM is the case: a piece of work that delivers a business outcome. The outcome of a case is a meaningful deliverable provided to a customer, partner, or internal stakeholder. A deliverable can be processing an auto-insurance claim, onboarding a new mortgage, or designing and releasing a new product, for example. In all these examples, the work to be done can be defined in terms of its resolution (the insurance claim is paid, the new account is opened, or the new product is released).
A case and a task are different things. Unlike a case, which is a business outcome, a task is a point-in-time assignment that must be accomplished. Cases manage a collection of tasks to drive a meaningful business outcome.
Likewise, a case isn’t a process. Whereas a case is a piece of work that needs to get done, a process is one of the ways in which that work may be completed. Most work is bigger than a single process, so many cases have multiple processes chugging away simultaneously.
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Chapter 1: Discovering DCM
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Think of a case as being the electronic folder that includes all the tasks, documents, and information needed to complete a piece of work. Like a folder, a case provides a single place to access everything you need. Unlike a folder, however, a case also contains the intelligence to retrieve the information you need, drive the processes you want, manage escalations and urgency, detect changes, and make the decisions needed to achieve the desired outcome. This intelligence is central to the value DCM provides organizations.
In computer-science terms, you can think of a case as being the object that gets worked on. Like any object in an objectoriented programming model, the case object has attributes (deadlines, urgency, current status, creator name, and so on) and is acted on by methods, which in DCM could include processes, ad hoc tasks, or business events. Getting a case to resolution requires managing people, documents, systems, information, and even things. Working a case involves one or more of the following tasks (see Figure 1-1):
✓ Coordinating multiple tasks, often across people and departments, and sometimes beyond the boundaries of a single organization
✓ Managing the people and stakeholders associated with a case, the most important of which generally is a customer
✓ Aggregating information from a variety of sources, including documents, images, and data from other computer systems
✓ Complying with processes and rules mandated either by best practices or regulations
✓ Detecting and responding to events that may affect the urgency or status of the case
✓ Reporting on status and history for management visibility and/or continuous improvement
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Source Pegasystems.
Figure 1-1: T he elements that make up a case.
Managing the Details DCM is about getting work done, which means delivering meaningful business outcomes. But simply defining and tracking progress toward a goal doesn’t necessarily improve the way you get there. DCM is powerful because it allows you to manage and improve the details of how work gets done in the context of the desired outcome.
Don’t confuse the unstructured, unpredictable nature of DCM with freeform collaboration or even project management tools. Like DCM, these tools can track and manage ad hoc tasks and decisions, but DCM is driven by outcomes. DCM combines structured processes and ad hoc work to drive work toward a goal rather than just tracking tasks as they’re completed.
Goal-driven DCM For years, the software industry has trained business people and technologists to think about business processes — how to define, execute, monitor, and optimize them. This technique
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Chapter 1: Discovering DCM
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has been largely successful because sizeable parts of business operations can be described as processes: predictable steps repeated over and over with minimal variation. The way a company manufactures a car or processes credit card payments may be very complex, for example, but the steps involved are repeatable and predictable. With enough research, automotive manufacturers and credit card companies can diagram their business processes. Most large — and many small or medium-sized — organizations operate at a level of complexity that makes end-to-end process modeling (mapping a full process from start to finish) practically impossible. Organizations need to implement automation, tracking, and management without spending years modeling end-to-end processes — especially ones that cross multiple departments. In addition, large chunks of work simply aren’t repeatable or predictable. Consider a few examples:
✓ An analyst investigating financial fraud won’t know what steps to take next until the root and extent of the problem — and its relationship to other investigations — becomes clear.
✓ A nurse managing the long-term care of a diabetic patient may need to change plans based on an unpredicted spike in a routine blood test.
✓ A field technician responding to a failure at an oil well may be defining a new solution or even creating a new best practice on the fly. In all these examples, the goal of each case is clear:
✓ The fraud investigator must determine whether a crime was committed and build a case for prosecution.
✓ The nurse wants to keep the patient healthy.
✓ The field technician wants to get the oil well running safely again.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition In each case, the precise steps required to reach the goal are determined on the fly. Nothing about these types of work is routine. In fact, the work is best described as exploratory, in that the workers are progressing toward a goal and deciding the detailed steps along the way.
Even work that’s very structured or predictable may spin off exceptions that aren’t structured or predictable.
Detail-oriented DCM The outcome of a case — the goal — is hugely important, but the details matter, too. Stakeholders care how a case got to its outcome. In some cases, processes and rules must be enforced, or tasks must be prescribed as responses to events. These processes and rules are often driven by regulation, especially in highly regulated industries such as financial services, government, health care, and telecommunications. Also, organizations often want their work to confirm to established best practices, thereby ensuring efficiency or delivering a satisfactory level of customer service. Details matter in hindsight as well. Regulators and shareholders continually ask businesses to provide audit information or prove that a best practice was followed. Organizations that want to improve the way they get work done need to study how previous cases were completed. Only by analyzing the details of previous work can they discover and test opportunities to improve efficiency.
DCM allows you to manage the details of how work gets done in the context of the business outcomes and goals that define why the work is being done in the first place.
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Chapter 1: Discovering DCM
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Thinking about cases The more you learn about case work, the more you can see DCM in everyday life. Most work isn’t 100 percent routine or 100 percent ad hoc. Most work is a mix. For routine work, you can simply follow a standard procedure to get it done. But other parts of your work aren’t routine at all: There’s no particular order or defined set of steps, and it takes a combination of judgment, experience, and contributions from different people to get it done properly. Consider the job of a police detective, who takes on an unsolved crime and pursues it until the case is closed. The police call it a case, and it has the same meaning as case in DCM. The detective develops a list of suspects, collects evidence, speaks to witnesses, and tries to piece together what happened. He consults other detectives, examines criminal data records, and sends fingerprints and forensic DNA samples to labs for analysis. Much of that work is standard procedure. But he also performs ad hoc
work. He follows hunches and intuition in deciding who he interviews, what he says, and in what order he chases leads. There are many possible ways to solve the crime. Flexibility is important for this aspect of the work. Whether following standard procedures or performing ad hoc work, at all times detectives must obey regulations governing permissible search and seizure, for filing evidence, and interviewing suspects and witnesses. Improperly obtained evidence will not stand up in court. Feel like you’ve seen this show before? Police, legal, and hospital television dramas are all examples of DCM — the combination of prescriptive and ad hoc work, orchestrated to achieve the optimal outcome — in about 42 minutes of air time. DCM helps organize routine and ad hoc work — and drive it to resolution, no matter how complicated or how many people or systems are involved.
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Silos Are for Farmers Understanding and managing details become increasingly important as organizations become more complex. Most large companies and even many smaller ones are broken into work groups, or silos. Work silos are often created for functional areas (Sales, Marketing), product lines (Retail, Commercial), or even regions (North America, Europe). Very large companies even have silos within their silos. This division of labor is often essential for managing people and providing budgetary accountability, but it can make getting the work done very difficult. Work silos are especially troublesome for cases that involve servicing or fulfilling customer requests, because this type of work often crosses multiple silos, and exposing this level of organizational complexity to your customers is a recipe for disaster.
Work can fall into gaps between silos, leaving your customers’ requests unfulfilled and your promises to them unmet. DCM, however, makes it easy for work to travel across silos. The case provides a container for everything that has been done and will be done to complete the request (see Figure 1-2). By tracking what tasks are assigned to whom, DCM provides accountability across silos. Because the case is focused on the outcome — such as fulfilling a request — it can ensure that promises to customers are kept.
Source Pegasystems.
Figure 1-2: D CM drives work across silos.
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Chapter 1: Discovering DCM
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Dynamic Work for the Digital Age Today’s world demands DCM. New technologies have created new ways to communicate and get work done. Customers can reach out to you via mobile applications and social networks, and the simple interactions that used to take place on the phone or face to face now bounce between different channels. Customers demand that service be as easy as buying from Amazon.com or visiting the Apple Store, and when they don’t get the service they want, they’re empowered to broadcast their opinions via social media. Organizations have important needs, too:
✓ They need a way to manage and respond to empowered customer engagement.
✓ They need to be able to pull all the interactions related to a service request into a single place.
✓ They need to shield customers from their own organizational complexity so that customers don’t have to navigate a web of organizational silos.
✓ They need to ensure that customer requests never fall between the cracks and that promises are never broken.
✓ They need to respond and act in real time when they get an unexpected customer request. Trying to diagram a business process that meets all these goals, however, would be almost impossible. Most companies don’t have enough whiteboard space to handle it. Some tasks aren’t completed in any particular order; others can be kicked off only after other tasks are completed. New processes can spin off without warning. Work is complex, ad hoc, and adaptive. That’s where DCM comes in. Static, structured processes don’t stand up to constant change. DCM allows a business to spin on a dime in response to changing needs. With DCM, users can add new tasks to work already in process, change the way a case is being handled, or even draw new business processes on the fly. DCM allows business
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition to move more quickly in managing their most complex work. This type of flexibility puts the dynamic into dynamic case management.
Business processes can manage the predictable and structured parts of a case, but much of the work that takes place in business is unpredictable. DCM is about managing the structured and the unstructured. Managing the needs of your increasingly empowered customers and the operational needs of your increasingly complex business means driving improvement at the intersection of two life cycles: the customer life cycle and the work life cycle.
Customer life cycle The customer life cycle is the journey your customers take when they engage in business with your company. In fact, marketers and customer service professionals often call this life cycle the customer journey. The journey starts even before customers are aware that your company exists. Ideally, through web searches, advertisements, articles, or word of mouth, they come to know your company and what it offers. They may visit your website, browse in your physical store, or follow your Twitter account. At a certain point, they may realize that your offerings might fill their needs, so they dig in deeper and evaluate your products. If a product is a good fit, a customer will buy it. The customer’s journey continues beyond that initial purchase, of course, because he or she gets to experience what it’s like to own your products or consume your services. If the experience is a good one, the customer becomes an advocate and may recommend you to friends and colleagues. If you build a strong, enough bond, the customer may buy again — often with much less work and investment on your part.
When customers choose to buy a product, it has to be simple for them to get their orders fulfilled. When they have problems, expert help should be easy to find.
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Work life cycle The work life cycle inside your company describes how work gets done: where it starts, how it’s organized, what responses are sent, and how the work is resolved. Navigating this life cycle correctly means moving across the silos of your organization. You must keep track of all the work you’re doing, escalating tasks that aren’t meeting their milestones or service levels so that you can ensure timely resolution and customer satisfaction.
Where life cycles meet DCM lives at the intersection of the customer and work life cycles (see Figure 1-3). Having a case allows you to track a customer request across various channels. You can see the customer’s history so you can predict and adapt to what he or she may do next. Many organizations mistakenly believe that there’s a trade-off between optimizing their customers’ experiences and improving their own internal operations. The prevailing wisdom is that you can’t save money and deliver great customer service. With DCM, however, you can improve the way you engage with your customers and simplify your operations. You can generate more revenue and lower your costs. Further, by simplifying the way your company works, you make your customer experience better.
Source Pegasystems.
Figure 1-3: T he intersection of the customer and work life cycles.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition If that outcome sounds like something you want for your business, you need DCM.
Combining DCM with BPM Some of our discussion of DCM may sound a little familiar. Proponents of business process management (BPM) — including the authors of this book — have been advocating the use of BPM to drive efficiency, bridge gaps between silos, and manage change. What is the relationship between BPM and DCM? A case in DCM is a piece of work that needs to get done. A process is one of the ways in which that work may be completed, which is where BPM comes in. Most work is bigger than a single process, so many cases have
multiple processes chugging away simultaneously. BPM means different things to different people. For some people, BPM is a discipline and a process-oriented approach to business improvement; for others, BPM is also a technology used to define and execute business processes. This technology often takes the form of a business process management suite (BPMS) that pulls together many functions, such as process modeling, process execution, business rules, and reporting.
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Chapter 2
Getting Value from DCM In This Chapter ▶ Improving customer experience ▶ Finding work efficiencies ▶ Improving management visibility and control ▶ Keeping up with market demands
D
ynamic case management (DCM) brings together the people and information needed to get work done completely and correctly the first time — and every time. In this chapter, you discover what DCM can do for you and your business.
Keeping Customers Happy The digital revolution has brought customers the convenience of 24/7 service, but too often, this service comes at the cost of quality. Nobody likes clumsy interactive voice response systems, long waits to talk to a live agent, or impersonal and ineffective service. Yet these experiences are commonplace. Your customers will trust and respect you only if they feel that you know them, you have their best interests at heart, and you can answer their questions and resolve their problems quickly and completely. By making every customer interaction an opportunity to demonstrate excellent service, DCM drives high levels of customer satisfaction and increases the value of customer relationships. Here’s how.
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Knowing your customers A DCM system makes it much easier for your customerfacing employees to know your customers and their relationship with your organization. Because it connects to your customer records and tracks every customer interaction, it can instantly present to your customer-facing employees the critical details of the relationship when the customer calls. These details include:
✓ Accounts, purchase, and service history
✓ History of this service request or complaint
✓ Emotional relationship with the customer (satisfied or unhappy; history of complaints)
✓ Importance of the customer (large or small; growing or declining) A DCM system spares customers the nuisance of explaining their situations every time they call. When they’re aware of customers’ background, customer service representatives can focus on listening and understanding new information, and can engage customers in more meaningful conversations. Some customer cases are resolved right away; for others, resolution can take days, weeks, or months. During that time, the people who work on the case may change due to altered work shifts, vacations, illness, or even company reorganizations. No matter. The DCM system keeps track of all customer interactions so that whoever works with the customer is always fully aware.
Not all customers are necessarily consumers. You can use DCM to improve engagement of prospects, partners, and employees as well.
Connecting across channels With the rapid growth of mobile devices and social channels, you have new opportunities to serve customers and empower employees wherever they go. Many people are already doing work on their personal phones and tablets, as well as using social sites to stay connected and find answers.
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Most business systems, however, are designed for specific channels, such as a call center or a website. When you use different systems for different channels, it’s hard to give your customers a consistent experience. DCM systems are designed to give customers the same experience across different channels (see Figure 2-1). No matter how they contact you, they get good service. A customer can start a case (such as an auto-accident claim) on a mobile phone and then follow up later on a website, by email, or in a phone call to a call center.
Source Pegasystems.
Figure 2-1: O mnichannel user experience.
Adapting to the situation In many customer-facing situations, blindly following standard procedure isn’t enough.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition In 2009, for example, Boston police ticketed a man for driving in the breakdown lane, even though his wife was in labor and he was driving her to the hospital. (The citation was thrown out in traffic court. The police department appealed but changed its mind when the case made the newspapers.) Or consider this example: A credit card customer calls to dispute a $50 charge that she doesn’t recognize. Despite the small amount in question, a customer history free of disputes, and a spotless record of timely payment, she has to speak with four representatives and fill out a form to get this simple work done. It’s infuriating when people refuse to apply some common sense and don’t think about the bigger picture. Because so many customer situations require some exercise of human judgment, rigid systems and mechanical responses won’t do. A DCM system doesn’t force participants to follow a set script. Rather, it interprets the situation, and intelligently guides flexible decision-making and action by asking and answering questions such as these:
✓ Given the background and the conversation, as well as your organization’s goals, policies, and procedures, what are the customers’ options?
✓ Which actions, products, or services would most likely (based on data on all past customer interactions) to produce the best outcome for the customer and the company?
✓ If escalation is required, which option is best for this customer? As the conversation with the customer proceeds, the DCM system reevaluates the situation in real time and changes its recommendations to the representative as required in pursuit of the best outcome.
Driving work to done A person who seeks to set something right wants more than just a response; he or she also wants a timely, complete resolution of the matter.
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Case-resolution case studies Many organizations use DCM to intelligently guide case resolution and maximize customer lifetime value. Here are three examples:
and merchant profile, network regulations, and agent skill level, as well as the bank’s best practices and policies.
✓ Insurance: DCM helps insurers service claims faster, eliminate manual handling of policy changes, track complex cases across multiple back-office functions, and detect fraud automatically.
✓ Telecommunications: Telecom munications companies use DCM to improve customer retention. Executing multichannel marketing strategies with personalized offers that align to customer needs and business goals prevents campaign collisions and ensures that offers are timely and consistent.
✓ Banking: Retail banks use DCM to resolve retail payment disputes. The system generates scripts and prompts based on the customer
Too often, though, customers are asked to “Hold, please, while I research that.” Worse, customers are forced to manage the resolution of their cases themselves. They must navigate the organization manually, following referrals, shepherding work from one representative to the next, and making repeated follow-up calls to ensure that the complicated work is done as promised. DCM systems address both these issues:
✓ They help representatives work fast by automatically pulling and displaying customer background, as well as relevant product and service details. Representatives see the whole picture without having to flip from screen to screen or put the customer on hold while processing a transaction. Intelligent guidance from the DCM system closes the performance gap between green and seasoned agents.
✓ DCM ensures that every case reaches resolution and that nothing falls between the cracks, no matter how complicated the work becomes. DCM eliminates the overhead and anxiety of manually tracking work that has been handed off. Representatives can concentrate fully on the job at hand: getting the best result for the customer and the company. In the event a customer calls in to seek an update on the status of a case, a representative can
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition quickly assess the situation, and see, for example, if the case is under review with a compliance group or with management for authorization.
Keeping promises How valuable is a promise fulfilled? In 2013, five banks were fined $25 billion for foreclosure-processing abuses during the financial crisis and its aftermath. Simply put, the mortgage servicing industry was ill equipped to help the overwhelming number of homeowners who needed assistance. Today, one of the biggest of these banks uses DCM to comply with federal regulations requiring them to give borrowers a fair shake. Its DCM default management system cut the time required to modify a loan from 120 days to just 30 days, meeting regulatory agreements and increasing loan processing throughput by 120 percent.
Improving Efficiency Organizations have many case management challenges, including customer, employee, and partner onboarding; warranty, insurance, and health-care claims; incident management; and emergency response. Efficiently resolving these challenges requires workers who can assess the problem quickly; access the right systems and data; and collaborate across multiple functions, teams, and geographies while following company policies and procedures. DCM works wonders by bringing together all the people and information needed to get work done and reach the best business outcomes. With DCM, jobs are done faster and done right the first time. DCM captures the essence of management guru Peter Drucker’s concept of “management by objective,” which states that people are more inventive and engaged when they work together to reach well-defined goals. According to Drucker, too many rigidly defined workflows and rules smother an organization’s ability to innovate. Instead, the organization should give workers the information and people they need to get the job done so that
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they concentrate less on the low-value logistics and more on the higher-value application of judgment.
Giving just enough information “Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink” was the Ancient Mariner’s lament. You too may feel thirsty — for useful, actionable information in a sea of data. You have to work hard to find what you need and avoid distractions. DCM systems radically improve worker efficiency by automatically fetching and presenting the information people need at particular points in managing a case. DCM puts all the information — emails, records, correspondence, and so on — in one place and organizes it for rapid review and understanding. Workers no longer have to consult multiple computer screens or rule books, and the history of the case is immediately visible. Because DCM systems are sensitive to the context of the work being done, only the information relevant to the job at hand is displayed. Simpler screens are easier to read and less likely to create distractions and misunderstanding.
Setting priorities A DCM system optimizes team productivity by assigning the highest-priority work to the appropriate people at the right time.
Work rosters made by traditional systems are typically delivered to teams in daily batches. Savvy workers cherry-pick the easy items that will improve their metrics, leaving the harder items to languish. DCM systems intelligently route priority tasks to the people who have the right skills for that work, ensuring that they’re continuously engaged with important work.
Being social According to a survey by Avenade, an IT services provider, more than half of all information workers today use social collaboration tools to share documents. They also use these tools to communicate with customers and find experts or
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition information inside their companies. This behavior makes sense, because people use these tools in their personal lives. Social tools are incredibly intuitive. It’s natural, then, that your employees use them to get their work done in the office.
Informal use of social tools in the enterprise bypasses the security, control, and audit of managed business processes. You can’t simply stop people from using social tools. But when social tools are disconnected from the work you’re trying to manage, you can’t trust them to get the job done. Also, those tools can’t be audited later if something goes wrong. A DCM system solves this problem by incorporating social collaboration into the case management system itself. Users have tools that allow them to find and chat with colleagues who can answer their questions, advance or resolve a case directly from their conversation feeds, and even incorporate conversations from external social media networks. Because all this activity occurs inside the DCM system, all these discussions become part of the case history. Everything is in one place for later review or audit.
Automating A DCM system goes beyond workflow (the management of the receipt, routing, and reporting on work) to actually automate the response and resolution of that work itself. Automation can drive tremendous productivity gains when decisions that don’t truly require human judgment can be handled by a system. Automation achieved through the application of policy (business rules) can make decisions based on the situation and its context. Simple decisions can address issues such as approving an order based on the order size, the customer’s credit rating, and the customer’s business history. More sophisticated automation also includes predictive and adaptive analytics. Advanced analytical capabilities can create an intelligent script for a sales or service representative, including a short list of offers to make to the customer ranked by desirability of those offers to the company. The DCM system analyzes the situation by comparing a customer’s history with the histories of all other customers and their responses to previous offers; then it produces the script based on the offer most likely to achieve the desired result. These materials are © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
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That’s the predictive aspect. The system continually learns from the response of customers and dynamically adjusts the offers over time. That’s the adaptive aspect.
Use case management reporting to determine what human activities are worth automating. Sometimes, it’s best to hold off on automation in the first phase of project delivery. Use real production data to determine where you’ll get the most value from the automatic application of business rules and analytics.
Automation is a key capability for improving not just operational efficiency, but operational quality as well. You can use automation to meet or even exceed the skills of your best customer representatives. Automated processes ensure that every interaction is a personal experience that fully leverages all your best practices.
Connecting to the Internet of Things From smartphone devices to smart TVs and connected cars, the vision of a connected world is turning into reality. The proliferation of connected things sensing and responding to the world around them creates ripe opportunities for innovation. DCM is a core technology for this revolution in connected devices, known as the Internet of Things. Production DCM systems in transportation, health care, and agriculture are among the first systems to create cases in response to events generated by connected devices, coordinating people, systems, and other connected devices in the course of completing that work. Air transport, for example, uses DCM to drive fast turnaround of airplanes at terminals, coordinating and optimizing the flow of millions of passengers and bags, as well as the actions of thousands of employees and systems (see Chapter 6). Many insurance companies now offer customers a smart device to install in their cars. The device tracks a customer’s driving habits, and the insurance company’s DCM system uses that data to underwrite the customer’s policy, based on precise driving records. Premiums can follow the customer’s driving record, and claims can automatically integrate accurate data from the car’s smart device.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition
Gaining operational visibility and control You can’t improve what you can’t see. Undocumented manual processes run in the dark, which makes it hard to measure and control individual and team performance. With undocumented manual processes, bottlenecks and inefficiencies can fester until customers or employees complain. If you don’t have visibility into the work, it’s impossible to be proactive. DCM gives you real-time views of work, as well as insight into trends and emerging problems, allowing you to take immediate action. Refer to Figure 5-2 to see an example dashboard, in which the data collected feeds directly into Lean Six Sigma process improvement disciplines.
The key to hitting service-level agreements (SLAs) is keeping an eye on milestones. A missed or risky milestone means that time must be made up later through reprioritizing or temporarily assigning more resources. Early warning and the ability to take action are critical to meeting SLAs.
Rules and regulations If a DCM system gives people leeway to exercise their judgment, how can you be confident that they’ll do the right thing? Without a doubt, industry regulations must be followed. Of course, company policies and procedures exist for good reasons and must be applied consistently. DCM uses rules to automatically constrain options and drive outcomes. These rules are the policies of your enterprise and the regulations of your industry. The value of this capability has grown with the increasing reach and complexity of regulations. Health insurance, for example, is a heavily regulated industry, and states mandate how quickly claims must be processed. Errors, inconsistencies, and duplications can complicate the processing of a claim, as can lapsed policies and late premium
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payments. All these situations may cause delays, which can lead to fines and interest payments. DCM claims-processing systems have helped a Midwest Blue Cross Blue Shield plan, for example, to increase the automatic resolution of claims by 38 percent and cut late payment fees by a whopping 90 percent.
Audits Every action in a DCM system — automated or human — is recorded for audit. You can rewind the tape and play back what happened in a case, step by step, seeing who did what and when they did it. Documentation, logs, and data can be produced and tailored to meet compliance requests and regulations. A DCM system also keeps an audit trail of system changes so that all changes in business rules are transparent as well. The operational and system change history are kept together, so you can even replay actions from systems that have been updated in the past. Compliance officers can review actions and results from old system configurations without needing to rebuild or restore the old systems.
Changing at the Pace of Market Demands Business history is littered with cautionary tales of one-hit wonders, companies that lost customer focus as they grew, and moribund firms that couldn’t keep pace with nimbler competitors. Were these companies blindsided by change? Some were; others knew what they had to do but couldn’t pull it off. From operational tweaks to profound enterprise transformations (see Chapter 5), DCM provides excellent change management capability. DCM is strongly outcome-oriented, keeping goals front and center throughout the initiative. Equally important, the technology involves and empowers the people closest to the business to change the way the business works.
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Business–IT collaboration The success of your DCM project depends on effective collaboration among business leaders, subject-matter experts, and information technology (IT) professionals.
If you don’t include business people in your DCM system design plan, your DCM initiative will fail. The good news is that DCM systems themselves facilitate the necessary collaboration, and DCM vendors provide methodologies to ensure that the right people are involved throughout the process.
Direct capture of objectives It’s much easier to collaborate when everyone is working from the same page. DCM design tools help by capturing business requirements in a way that both business and IT can understand. A DCM system visually models all aspects of the system, including high-level case flow, detailed processes, the appearance of user screens, and the data to be handled. At any time, you can demonstrate and verify a DCM system, even in skeletal form, so that everyone can see that it accurately models the work you want to be done. This visually modeled WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) approach eliminates the misunderstandings that plague teams that construct applications with traditional methods. These traditional methods require business analysts to document requirements in painstaking detail; IT analysts translate the requirements into IT designs; then programmers implement the designs into finished applications. Too often, however, the results don’t match what business people expected. The entire process can take so long that the system is obsolete before it’s done.
By directly capturing business objectives and immediately turning them into demonstrable systems, DCM makes it possible to validate designs during the requirements-gathering sessions.
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Although it’s possible to build a DCM system by using traditional waterfall development methods, in which all requirements are defined before any functional systems are delivered, most DCM systems are built with agile development methods, in which systems are delivered in a phased approach. Each phase (called a sliver) introduces additional functionality and builds on what came before. An agile approach not only delivers valuable functionality to the business faster, but also enables participants to review and refine requirements throughout the project. For more on agile and waterfall methods, see Chapter 5.
Business rules Business rules are policies that govern how work gets done. Through business rules, business people can change the way a DCM system works without running change cycles with the technical teams. This procedure radically reduces the time it takes to update business policy in a fast-changing environment, as these examples illustrate:
✓ A business rule states that all transactions greater than $10,000 must be reviewed by a supervisor. It turns out that this rule generates many more reviews than necessary and that a more appropriate value is $20,000. With DCM, an authorized business person is empowered to make that change directly; no programming changes are required.
✓ Some insurance rules vary state by state; others are common across all states. In an organization that uses DCM, when regulations change, business people can change all rules directly in the system, and subsequent processing of claims against these rules follow the new regulations.
Design by doing For many kinds of work, it’s impossible to predict every eventuality. People encounter circumstances that you didn’t account for in your original case definitions. That’s okay. DCM frees workers to perform ad hoc work as long as it doesn’t violate the policies that govern the work.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition Design by doing refers to DCM’s ability to define new case types based on ad hoc work that was actually done. These new case types can then be used by many people to do that kind of work in the future.
Too often, great inventions don’t become true innovations because they aren’t made broadly known or usable. DCM gives you a way to capture the best practices and make them part of the way that work is done.
Design by doing, like any other type of change management, requires thoughtful governance. Just because operational workers can change the way that work is done for the team doesn’t mean that they should. Use design by doing to capture great ideas that feed into your change management discipline.
Repeatability and scale Standardization and economies of scale drive profitable growth and competitive advantage. Standardized parts enabled mass production, an innovation that left craft industry in the dust. Similarly, standardized shipping containers unleashed a dramatic expansion of global commerce. Standardization is also a key principle in simplifying and improving customer experience. For example:
✓ Offering global customers around-the-clock service options with tiered service levels (such as platinum, gold, and silver)
✓ Reducing operational costs and head count by centralizing functions
✓ Introducing global self-service
✓ Cross-selling products across the product portfolio Almost every process improvement and simplification initiative, however, involves a terrible conundrum. On one hand, to get more consistent customer experience and more efficient processes, you need to standardize policies and practices across departments, products, channels, and regions. On the other hand, a one-size-fits-all approach is impossible to achieve
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because different departments, products, channels, and regions have distinct needs and legitimate reasons to resist standardization. Railroading them won’t work. What can you do? Large enterprises use DCM to solve this problem by setting up a layered business architecture that establishes shared and common policies and procedures that apply everywhere (see Figure 2-2). Then these enterprises customize these common policies and procedures by specifying how particular groups’ requirements depart from the standard. These departures from the standard (specializations) can themselves be layered. So, for example, a large enterprise can establish global standards that apply everywhere, tailor these global standards to meet regulatory requirements of particular countries, and then further specialize them to meet requirements of particular states or provinces.
Source Pegasystems.
Figure 2-2: L ayered business architecture separates common services from specialized services.
The efficiencies produced by this layered approach can be enormous. Imagine a multinational insurance company that manages 5 lines of business through 3 channels in 50 countries. How many claims systems would it need? If you had to build a system for each country, line of business, and channel, you’d have 750 claims processing systems to build and maintain.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition A much better approach is to build a single claims processing system that’s 90 percent consistent for every claim and 10 percent customized for customers’ unique needs. As a result, you can give customers a consistent experience when the company processes a claim, no matter what products or region the claim involves. You can meet the varied (and often contradictory) regulatory requirements of different regions. Finally, you can get visibility and control of claims processing from top to bottom, no matter what channel originally sold the policy.
It’s all in the model With traditional business process management (BPM) tools, organizations struggle to manage the complexity of enterprise process improvement. Either they must model every variance and contingency in a single complex model, or they must implement a large number of smaller specialized models that represent the various situations. Real-world processes in large organizations typically have too many variants to make either approach practical or cost effective.
DCM handles a layered business architecture by using an object model with inheritance defining the relationships among the common and derived policies and procedures. The key to making this architecture work is ensuring that the object model applies to every artifact of the DCM system: case types, processes, business rules, user interface screens, data mappings, and so on. A DCM system of this type is easy to replicate and scale because every aspect that defines how the system will work is in the model.
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Chapter 3
Organizing Your Work for DCM In This Chapter ▶ Defining and organizing case types ▶ Working with case stages ▶ Building for reuse
W
e hope that you’re excited about the possibilities and benefits that dynamic case management (DCM) offers your organization and curious about how to get started. In this chapter, you see what you need to know to design a DCM solution.
Defining Case Types The first question to ask when designing a DCM solution is simple: “Where do I start?” You start by defining your case types. A case type is the definition of a category of work. Creating case types is the first step in defining a DCM solution. Case types include the characteristics that a set of cases share, including the data collected for them and the steps required to get the work done. When users interact with a DCM solution, every case they create is an instance of a defined case type. You might define a case type called Address Change, for example. After that, each time you process a new request to change a customer’s address, that new request creates a new case of type Address Change.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition If you’re familiar with object-oriented programming, the parallels should be obvious. The case type is the class of case you’re implementing, and the cases themselves are objects or instances of that class. Sophisticated DCM systems actually implement an object-oriented hierarchy in which case types can be descendants of other case types. Address Change may be a descendent of a larger Customer Service case type, for example. Ask yourself two questions when defining your case types:
✓ How would customers describe the various pieces of work they want done on their behalf?
✓ How would the business describe the outcomes it’s trying to achieve with these types of work? You may need to ask several people for answers to the second question, including the users of the application, the manager in charge of the department, and perhaps even senior executives. All these stakeholders may have very different perspectives of the desired business outcome. Consider the way that the following people might describe a customer address change:
✓ The vice president of customer service might say that the goal is to change the customer’s address quickly and correctly.
✓ The chief marketing officer might say that the goal is to detect a major life event for the customer (such as a new home purchase) and offer relevant products.
✓ An IT director tasked with a master data management project might say that the goal is to ensure that your company has the same contact information for the customer on all your back-end systems.
Asking multiple people is important, because a piece of work with a business outcome usually reflects smaller pieces of work with meaningful business outcomes of their own. Quite often, to achieve the outcome your customer desires, you need to have multiple simultaneous work streams that are managed and measured independently.
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When you ask managers and executives about the business outcomes they are trying to achieve, their answers are a pretty good indicator of the reports, metrics, and key performance indicators you should bake into your solution.
Knowing Where Your Parents and Children Are When you ask different people to describe the outcome of the work you’re trying to improve, you sometimes get different answers. Imagine that you work for a credit card company and have been asked to improve the way your company handles disputed transactions. A disputed transaction is an incorrect or potentially fraudulent transaction that shows up on a customer’s bill, often in conjunction with some other event, such as a lost or stolen card. If you asked the customer what he wants to happen, he’d probably say, “I lost my wallet. How do you fix everything?” What happens when you ask your business team? You might get answers like these:
✓ The vice president of your fraud department might say, “We need to make sure we investigate any potential fraud and file the appropriate documentation with the government.”
✓ The vice president of operations might say, “We need to work with our merchants to refund any incorrect payments.”
✓ Your chief marketing officer might say, “We need to get the customer a new card as quickly as possible so he can keep using our products.” Each of these people has described a case type — that is, each has described a complex piece of work that has a meaningful business outcome. In this case, completing the customer’s outcome (“fix my lost wallet”) depends on completing the other outcomes as well. In this example, you’d call the customer goal (“fix my lost wallet”) the parent case. The other cases are children, subordinate to the parent.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition The children of one parent case can also be parents to other child cases. This relationship between parent and child cases is often called the case hierarchy (see Figure 3-1).
Source Pegasystems.
Figure 3-1: P arents and children in a case hierarchy.
Don’t confuse child cases with tasks. Tasks are individual steps completed by a person, often in a single sitting. Cases — even child cases — aggregate multiple tasks to deliver a meaningful business outcome.
Managing complexity Defining parent and child cases allows different parts of a business to manage the work they need to manage while still delivering a cohesive experience. Child cases, especially at the bottom of the case hierarchy, often align with the needs of individual departments or teams within an organization. Top-level parent cases often reflect the customer-facing goals. In the example in the preceding section, the customer can monitor and manage the status of his lost-wallet claim without being exposed to the organizational and regulatory complexity needed to address the other pieces of work that must be done. Creating child cases is one of the ways in which DCM helps insulate your customer from the work silos in your organization. Organizations develop silos for a good reason: Silos allow a company to manage functional areas and align employees who are working on related tasks. This approach becomes a problem, however, when a large organization with multiple business lines and work silos tries to deliver a cohesive customer experience. Employees struggle to navigate silos, often dealing with multiple systems and applications. Worse,
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customers end up feeling like pinballs, bouncing between silos (“Let me transfer you to. . .”) without ever getting clear answers to their questions.
Organizing cases into parents and children allows you to address the needs of your customers — represented by the parent cases — while insulating them from the complexities of your organizational silos, which can be managed by the child cases. In the lost-wallet example, the complexity of the work to be done isn’t going away. Government regulations and rules issued by the credit card companies themselves require organizations to follow certain processes, obtain certain documents, and meet certain deadlines. The beauty of using DCM, with its parent/child case relationships, is that you can manage those requirements by having child cases that reflect your organization’s internal outcomes. Rolling those child cases up to a parent allows you to manage your customers’ needs and expectations as well.
Working in parallel Parent and child case relationships also make parallel work easy to manage. In the lost-wallet example, the parent case (“fix my lost wallet”) may spin off multiple child cases. Each of those child cases — transaction payments, fraud investigation, and so on — can be processed in parallel, with the parent case managing the relationships among the child cases.
Adding children to a parent Part of the definition of a case type includes the definition of the child cases it could contain. If a case type can contain child cases, it becomes a parent to those cases. Additionally, the case type should define when (and whether) that child case should be attached to the parent. Some child cases are created automatically at the start of the parent case or when the parent case crosses a particular milestone. Other child cases are defined as optional and are added to the parent only under specific conditions or when requested by a stakeholder or user.
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Breaking Cases into Work Stages When case types are defined and parent/child relationships are assembled into the case hierarchy, the next step is defining how work in each case type is to be completed. You begin by defining the stages that outline the journey from starting a piece of work to completing it. Stages represent the high-level flow a case goes through.
Stages aren’t child cases; they don’t represent meaningful business outcomes on their own. Stages aren’t tasks, either, because they aren’t individual steps. If you’ve ever drawn a series of steps on a whiteboard, you’ve probably defined a series of stages.
Using stages to define the high-level flow of a case can be a lot easier than defining the detailed steps that make up a business process. It’s easier to get stakeholders to agree on stages than to get them to agree on low-level steps, which have levels of detail and variation that are challenging to capture. For this reason, capturing case stages is a great way to start defining your DCM application.
Meaningful stages Define stages in such a way that their meaning is apparent to all stakeholders in the case, including the customer. Stages become the way that participants in a DCM solution communicate about the status of the cases they’re managing. A great example of meaningful stages is the Domino’s Pizza online ordering system, called the Domino’s Tracker. When you order a pizza from Domino’s online, the Domino’s Tracker graphically displays the stages your order is going through: Order Placed, Prep, Bake, Quality Check, and Out for Delivery. A customer can watch her pizza progress through these stages in real time. Because the stages are easily understandable, the customer knows exactly where the store is in its progress on the work. Domino’s employees and managers can use the stages to track bottlenecks or areas for efficiency improvement.
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Milestones as markers The markers between stages are called milestones. Milestones are the gates that a case must pass through to move from stage to stage. Defining the milestones at the beginning or end of each stage is essential to tracking and monitoring to the progress of work in your DCM application.
Tasks and processes After you define your stages, you begin to fill in the work to be done. That work most often takes the form of tasks and processes. Tasks are individual steps in the case, completed by a single person, often in a single sitting. For example, a task in making a pizza might be “Add Toppings.” If your stage consists of nothing but manual tasks, or if the tasks in your stage can be performed in any order, defining the stage as a set of tasks is generally sufficient. If you need to string a series of tasks together in a specific order, or if you want to include automated steps or decisions in your stage, it is useful to define a process. A process is a set of tasks, activities, material, and/or information flow. Often, DCM tools will let you use graphical process models to define a set of steps, and then associate those processes with individual stages. This allows you to keep process models concise and manageable, while using the stages of the case to overall view into the end-to-end work.
Service levels and deadlines Each stage should also have service levels associated with it. Service levels define the time frame in which stages should be completed and are often expressed in the form of a goal (when you want to have this stage completed by) or a deadline (when you need to have this stage completed by). Some DCM applications define both a Goal and a Deadline stage for each service, increasing the level of escalation as each goal or deadline is met.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition Service levels are usually defined in either of two ways:
✓ Based on an explicit date: In a case type for processing a mortgage application, for example, a closing date is usually defined. Each stage of the mortgage application has a service level that’s defined relative to the desired closing date.
✓ Based on a number of days from the start of each stage: A customer service case may demand that the Fulfillment stage be completed within three days of starting the stage, for example.
Define service levels not just for each stage, but for the overall case type as well. Make sure that the service levels for the stages (or even for individual tasks and processes, if you have them) roll up into the overall case-type service levels. Service levels should also define actions. When the goal or deadline for a service level is crossed, the case and its tasks should be escalated. Escalation could take the form of increasing the urgency of the case so that tasks float to the top of users’ work lists. It may also include triggering escalation actions such as sending an email or text, or transferring the case to a supervisor.
Alternative stages Cases usually flow linearly from one stage to the next. In the pizza example (see “Meaningful stages” earlier in this chapter), a pizza goes from Order Placed to Prep to Bake. But what if the customer calls in to cancel the order? At this point, the case needs to drop out of the normal flow of stages and into an alternative stage called Canceled. Alternative stages handle exceptions or alternative paths in case processing. Tasks responsible for cleaning up from Canceled or Restarted processes often live within the alternative stages of a case. In the pizza example, a canceled order may require recall of the driver and collection of the uneaten pizza for donation to a food bank. The alternative stage called Canceled would contain this work.
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Resolution: The final stage The last stage of every case type is Resolution, which represents the completion of a piece of work. Most cases get to the Resolution stage and stay there indefinitely. At this point, the case, its data, and its processing history become vital pieces of information for reporting on and improving your business. Some cases are reopened when stakeholders demand review or reprocessing. A pizza case may be resolved when the order is completed, but if a customer calls back to complain about the order, the pizza case — and all the data collected for it — can be reopened to process the complaint. When a case is reopened, it can drop into an alternative series of stages (see the preceding section) or go back to an earlier stage for reprocessing.
Looking at resolved pieces of work is a great way to understand the stages and the data of your cases. Because resolved work has already passed through all the stages, you can find evidence of the stages in the resolved work and use that evidence to define the stages for your case type.
Thinking about Reuse As you define the case types, parent/child relationships, and case stages of your DCM application, keep reuse in mind. You may eventually expand your DCM solution beyond its initial project to other pieces of work, so you want to find ways to reuse the case types and stages you’ve already defined. Reuse is important for two reasons:
✓ It delivers improved time to market. If you’ve already defined a case type that you can reuse in multiple places, reusing that case type means you don’t have to rebuild it a second time (or a third or fourth time).
✓ It provides consistency. Your organization’s legal department may have a way of handling fraud investigations that it wants every department and line of business to conform to. Creating a reusable case type called Fraud and defining that case type as a child case with many
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition parents (Account Opening, Claims, and so on) ensures that all groups in your organization follow the same best practices for investigating fraud.
You reuse much more than just your case types and stages, of course. In fact, as you think about your DCM solution, you find many opportunities for reuse, especially when you think about the tasks and processes that define how a piece of work is to be completed.
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Chapter 4
Get ting Case Work Done In This Chapter ▶ Understanding automation ▶ Managing cases and their data ▶ Automating cases with business processes ▶ Using analytics and reporting to guide and track cases
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hapter 3 shows how case types are defined and how stages and milestones are identified. In this chapter, you see how to focus on the core purpose of dynamic case management (DCM): getting work done.
Seeing the Power of Automation DCM is unique in that it focuses on all three ways in which software enables work to be improved:
✓ Automating what can be automated
✓ Guiding users when automation isn’t possible
✓ Tracking work that’s too unpredictable to guide or automate Automating work is powerful. Eliminating manual work has delivered efficiency benefits and improved worker productivity by a factor of four since the 1950s, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But many types of work can’t be fully automated: The work may be too unpredictable or may require a degree of human judgment. In such cases, you can guide the users who perform the work toward a goal while ensuring adherence to best practices that meaningfully affect throughput and consistency.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition Most organizations — especially large, complex organizations — don’t have enough insight into many work processes to consider automating them end to end. Process visibility must precede automation, and there’s real business value in providing that visibility. If you can obtain visibility into which stages take the most effort or have the most negative effect on customers, you gain the insight you need to focus your improvement efforts. To get that insight, you need to start with the data.
Don’t think about automating everything. Strive to gain visibility into the overall case while automating key process hot spots. This approach delivers significant benefits.
Getting the Data Right To use DCM to bring a case to resolution, you must give the system and its users the right information. This information — the case data — includes everything from a customer’s email address to an account balance to a transaction amount. Case data also contains metadata, which is the information recorded by the DCM system as it tracks the progress the case makes as it performs work (see Figure 4-1). This metadata includes information like case IDs, status information, and audit history.
Source Pegasystems.
Figure 4-1: D ata associated with a case.
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The easiest way to figure out the case data for a given case type is to look at an example of a resolved piece of work, such as a manual record, an email chain, or a document that represents the output of the work. Looking at the resolved work shows the business data of the case: the data that was collected to bring the work to resolution
Looking at examples of resolved work is an essential step in designing your DCM solution.
Structured and unstructured business data Each case type has its own set of business data. The business data for an Address Change case type, for example, includes the customer’s current address, the customer’s new address, the reason for the change, and so on. This type of data is often referred to as structured data, because each piece of information is formally defined in a field and ultimately has a value assigned to it.
The socialization of unstructured data Social media has stimulated exponential growth in unstructured data. Tweets, Facebook posts, and YouTube videos are relevant sources of information for many case types. This proliferation of unstructured data has led to a growth in technologies that can turn unstructured data into structured data. For years, companies have used optical character recognition (OCR) to turn scanned images into text. Now voice recognition is becoming increasingly effective at creating text from audio.
The text used in a tweet or Facebook post, or derived from OCR or voice recognition, is still largely unstructured. An evolving set of technologies focuses on deriving meaning from unstructured text. Sentiment analysis, for example, seeks to derive the tone of a tweet or short text message (that is, positive or negative). Advanced technologies can derive meaning or identify structured data such as account numbers inside unstructured blocks of text.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition Another type of business data is often associated with a case: unstructured data. Unstructured data is just what it sounds like. It may be in digital form, but it’s not structured. Unstructured case data includes documents, images, videos, and other items that are leveraged during case processing. An insurance claim, for example, may have pictures of the accident attached to it. Although this data can’t be easily separated into fields and values, it can often be defined in terms of attachment types. Attachment types create categories of unstructured documentation for the case. For the insurance-claim example, you might have documents of type Incident Photo. Rules in the case may require that certain attachment types are present to progress between stages. For instance, the insurance case may require that the Incident Photo is attached before the Research stage is complete.
Systems of record Case data is populated in multiple ways. It can be manually entered into the case by a clerk or business member, or it may be pulled from a storage application. Systems of record (SORs) are the legacy applications that store business core data, and they’re often hard and risky to change. DCM applications often interface with external SORs to fetch and update the data they need. An Address Change case isn’t the SOR for a customer’s address, for example; that information often lives in a customer information file, database, or legacy application. The DCM application reads that data from the external system and updates that system with any changes before the case is considered to be resolved. Retrieval of data from existing systems, and update of data into existing systems, is often a primary challenge during DCM implementations. It is important for business and IT to collaborate in order to understand both the business goals and objectives of the case, and the existing systems that need to be
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read and updated to accommodate that business object. For IT experts, DCM projects can often provide useful insights as to the business requirements for data access: What systems does the business need to access in order to drive meaningful work? These insights can help prioritize integration-centric IT projects that make systems more easily accessible, such as the development of services or the deployment of an enterprise service bus.
Although you may want lots of data to complete a case, don’t make the mistake of retrieving all the data at once. Advanced DCM platforms retrieve data as needed and even predict what data might be needed and prefetch it in the background so that the user experience isn’t affected by slow data lookups. Sometimes, a DCM application acts like an SOR, especially when the data being recorded is equivalent to the case itself. An insurance claims system, for example, may be a DCM application for processing insurance claims, but it may also function as the SOR for all claims within the organization. Even in this example, some information, such as the details of the insurance policy or the customer’s contact information, is sourced from other systems.
Because DCM applications are easy to change and are focused on the needs of the business and the customer, many organizations choose to wrap and renew their legacy SORs with DCM applications rather than make expensive and risky changes in their SORs.
Case metadata Case metadata is information about the status of the case and the history of how the case was processed. This data generally isn’t unique to any specific case type; it appears in almost every case in almost every DCM application. Table 4-1 shows some sample pieces of case metadata.
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Table 4-1
Common Case Metadata
Field
Details
Urgency
Urgency of the case, often expressed on a 0–100 scale and essential to prioritizing work
SLA Information
Service-level information about the case, often in the form of a goal or deadline
Status
High-level status of the case, such as New, Opened, Pending, or Resolved
Create Date Time
Date and time when the case was created
Last Update Date Time
Date and time when the case was last updated
Create Operator
Name of the person who created the case
Advanced DCM platforms often capture 60 to 70 pieces of case metadata. This information drives case processing and provides historical information about how a case was worked. When a business looks at throughput rates, average processing times, bottlenecks, and other key case metrics, it generally reviews case metadata.
Automating with Processes Process automation is the holy grail of many DCM applications. The business benefits of straight-through processing are obvious: No manual work means reduced costs, increased throughput, and faster resolution. But most cases are too complex to draw the full process from end to end. Most business managers probably couldn’t even describe their endto-end process without a huge investment in research and analysis. The best way to automate a case is to attach chunks of process to the stages of the case. Each stage of a case may have multiple processes associated with it.
Using smaller chunks of process that attach to case stages allows you to build reusable processes that can be applied to other stages or even other case types.
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You gotta know the rules BPM is a large topic in and of itself — some of us have written books about it — and we can’t cover all of the details here. But a key part of using processes to automate your case and driving a case to resolution is the use of business rules. Business rules define the policies of how your business operates. They put human decisions in a form that a computer can automate. Business rules often use metaphors, such as tables or decision trees, to express logic in a way that business experts can understand and change. Whenever possible, avoid burying business rules for your DCM application in programming or code. Business rules tend to be dynamic. They need to change to keep up with changing regulations, market variations, or operational decisions. Using
business-friendly metaphors and forms to define your rules helps you capture more richness and ensure that the rules can be easily changed. You can use business rules to automate processes that otherwise would require human judgment, especially when that judgment is repeatable and predictable. If a case manages a customer who’s applying for a student loan, business rules could define whether the loan is approved or declined and then calculate the interest rate that should be charged. In an Order Fulfillment case type, business rules might decide what shipping costs should be added to the order and whether to bundle all the products or ship them separately. Including business rules in your case processes is essential to automating the steps.
This topic reaches the intersection of DCM and business process management (BPM). Business processes are a sequential series of manual and automated steps. Those manual and automated steps operate on the case, pushing each stage to completion and the case one stage closer to resolution.
Guiding with Rules and Analytics Many cases can’t be completed without some form of human judgment or intervention. Experts in a particular type of work are essential for managing the nuances of many case types. When a major piece of machinery, such as an oil well or a
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition turbine, experiences a catastrophic failure, human expertise is usually essential to completing an investigation of the cause. Ideally, by now you realize that this investigation is a case. In these examples, you may not be able to attach processes to all your case stages. Some stages may consist of a set of manual tasks that need to be accomplished, sometimes in an arbitrary order. For some case types, you may define ad hoc tasks, which can be added to stages at any time.
Guided processing Performing ad hoc tasks doesn’t mean that a person must work alone. A DCM system often helps the user find the best solution. Helping the user in this way is called guided processing. The DCM application may use business rules to provide suggestions as to what to do next. A DCM customer-service application suggests next steps to take to provide the best service to the customer, perhaps suggesting activating online statement access when a customer asks that a new copy of his statement be mailed. In such situations, the rules are relatively simple, repeatable, and easy to capture with standard business-rules techniques.
DCM and Big Data Sometimes, you need guidance more advanced than business rules. An emerging discipline called predictive analytics uses specialized technology to mine historical data for patterns. Those patterns are subtle enough, and the data sets are often so massive — you may have heard the term Big Data — that they can’t be recognized by a single person. Computers can find them, however, and can offer new insights.
Many definitions of Big Data focus on the three Vs of the data: volume, velocity, and variety. A simpler definition is more useful for purposes of this book: Big Data is about finding new insights regardless of the amount or type of data used. DCM is the perfect match for Big Data and predictive analytics. Completed cases make up a wonderful historical data store that you can mine for new insights and opportunities for automation.
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When an investigator looks into equipment failure, for example, she can mine previously completed investigation cases to build predictive algorithms that suggest possible causes for the current investigation case. This method gives the investigator a place to start, and the current case can be resolved faster, more consistently, and more effectively.
Tracking the Unpredictable Large amounts of work can’t be automated or even guided. This type of work is often called ad hoc work. In ad hoc work, people add tasks and decide next steps as the work progresses. Managing this ad hoc work is the most dynamic part of DCM. If work is manual and ad hoc, what role can a DCM software application play? DCM supports ad hoc work in three important ways:
✓ DCM tracks what is happening. Traditional ways of managing ad hoc work — such as spreadsheets, emails, and to do lists — offer little insight or visibility into the work. DCM provides constant, real-time reporting, giving stakeholders and managers a consistent view of work in progress.
✓ DCM ensures consistency. If certain tasks must be completed or certain pieces of data must be captured to complete work, DCM can ensure that the data is captured and/or the task is completed.
✓ DCM tracking provides insights for guiding and even automating future tasks. DCM provides visibility into how much of the manual work is done and allows managers to understand the patterns in that work. Using DCM, for example, a manager might discover that cases completed in the shortest time always perform three tasks in a specific order. This discovery creates an opportunity for guiding and automating future work.
Even if you can’t automate a case end to end, using DCM to track how cases are being processed provides insights that may help you automate work in the future.
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Designing by doing DCM allows users to design case processing on the fly. In advanced DCM applications, power users can draw new business processes in real time. Perhaps a marketing manager wants to manage a new campaign, and she starts a new Marketing Campaign case type. That case provides some common steps, but it also allows her to draw a process for her first stage on the fly and then
captures her process to be reused in future cases. In this example, the traditional approach to software development is upended. Rather than build an application that defines how users will use it, DCM allows the application to be defined by how users use it. For more on design by doing, see Chapter 2.
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Chapter 5
Bringing DCM to the Enterprise In This Chapter ▶ Getting buy-in ▶ Assigning roles ▶ Seeking continuous improvement ▶ Ensuring repeatable success
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hanging an organization is never easy. Delivering strategic and far-reaching change — true business transformation — is especially difficult. It’s hard to ensure that all needs are heard and accommodated. It’s also hard to achieve quick, meaningful wins that build momentum while delivering on a bigger vision. Bringing dynamic case management (DCM) to the enterprise can help you achieve these goals. Here’s how you do it.
Selling DCM to Employees Why do some projects fail while others succeed? A good technical solution is necessary, of course, but projects rarely fail for technical reasons. Rather, the people side — leadership and adoption — tends to make or break the initiative. This socalled “soft stuff” matters. Throughout a DCM initiative, make sure that the people in your organization know two things:
✓ Why things are changing: Keep your DCM initiatives’ goals front and center. Make sure that leaders state and help build awareness of these goals, why they must be achieved, and what would happen if they aren’t achieved.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition ✓ What’s in it for them: Make the benefits personal and tangible. Use DCM’s collaborative design to capture users’ requirements directly in the system and immediately demonstrate to them how the system will work. If something isn’t right, fix it right then and there. People will feel ownership when they know that they’ve been heard and understood.
Understanding Roles and Responsibilities DCM initiatives use advanced information technology to change the way work gets done. You need a team whose members have knowledge of how the business operates, skill in DCM technology, and experience in change management. Representation from several groups — business, IT, and program/project management — is important, as you see in this section.
Business The members of your business delegation must have insight into how work gets done today, as well as a vision of the business outcomes that the DCM initiative should deliver. The business team should have the following members:
✓ Project sponsor: The project sponsor states goals and champions the initiative from start to finish. He or she helps manage politics at the executive level, ensures that resources are made available, and resolves blocking issues. In large projects that cross functional boundaries, the sponsor may assemble a steering group of senior managers of the affected organizations.
For an initiative that focuses on a single business function, the project sponsor can be that function’s owner, such as the vice president of marketing or customer service. For a corporation-wide transformation initiative, such as a consolidation of multiple subsidiaries into corporate functions, the project sponsor usually is the executive who has direct responsibility for the outcome.
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Make sure that your project sponsor commits to visible and continual engagement throughout the project. Be concrete and specific about what you need. If an executive is unwilling or unable to deliver these things, your initiative isn’t aligned with corporate goals.
✓ Subject-matter experts (SMEs): SMEs have detailed knowledge of how work gets done and value the goals of the DCM project. Engage one SME for each major area of the business that’s involved in the initiative.
IT team Your information technology (IT) team provides expertise on the DCM technology. Its members can be in-house personnel or a combination of your people with those of your DCM vendor, consultants, system integrators, and other third parties. Many organizations also staff this team with people from business operations. Team members offer a spectrum of skills and backgrounds in business, technology, and application design. The IT team should have the following members:
✓ Business architect: The business architect manages the collection of business requirements, regularly meets with business SMEs, and collaboratively captures needs directly in the DCM system. A business architect should have DCM vendor certification in these practices and may also be skilled in Lean and Six Sigma methodologies.
Business architects often come from business operations groups.
✓ System architect: The system architect configures the DCM application and integrates it with other IT systems. He or she should be a vendor-certified practitioner of the DCM system.
✓ User experience architect: This person applies humanfactor design expertise to ensure that solutions are easy to understand and use.
✓ IT representatives: These team members represent your IT organization’s release management, support, infrastructure, training, testing, and architecture teams. A DCM system implementation requires resources typical of a significant enterprise software project.
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If the DCM project is your first, include an experienced senior system architect from the DCM vendor to ensure that best practices are used throughout the project.
Include your user experience architect from the early stages of the project, when you begin gathering requirements from business SMEs. If you wait too long, he or she won’t be able to influence solution design.
Program governance Good governance begins with strong sponsorship. The project sponsor should not only be the project’s champion, but also the final escalation point to resolve project issues. DCM projects that involve significant time and scope usually engage at least two project managers: one to manage the overall initiative and one to manage the day-to-day tasks of the technical team. You need to fill these roles:
✓ Project manager: The project manager defines the project scope and takes responsibility for on-time, on-budget delivery by managing the relationships of all project contributors (yours, the vendor’s, and any consultants).
✓ Technical engagement lead: The technical engagement lead supports the project manager by managing project work and schedules for the business and system teams. After you establish sponsorship and clearly define roles and responsibilities, use well-structured meetings as the way to ensure issues and risks are raised and resolved as they arise or can be escalated as needed. The most successful projects rely on three levels of oversight:
✓ Project governance: This bimonthly to monthly review allows you, your system integrator, and your technical and business representatives from your DCM vendor to validate the integrity of the solution and raise any new issues that threaten success. Project stakeholders must attend, and they must be ready and willing to take responsibility for removing roadblocks. Publish the agenda and key materials for participants to review in advance.
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✓ Weekly project update: This weekly check-in, led by the project manager, keeps the project sponsor up to date on progress, and gives the team a chance to raise and resolve issues before they develop into risks that might impact the overall project. It’s also the right place to keep a tight rein on project scope.
✓ Daily standup meeting: This is a 15-minute daily meeting with the project team to report on goals for the day. It’s an opportunity for the project manager to keep people on schedule, on task, and to unearth any dependencies and clear obstacles. It’s a great way to maintain laser focus on what’s inside and outside in the project’s scope.
Transparency is the key to successful program management. Maintain clarity around everyone’s roles and responsibilities and you’ll go a long way toward keeping the project in control. Make sure teams have the power to take action and to know when to escalate issues to the next level.
Starting Small, Winning Fast DCM technology lends itself to agile system design and delivery methodologies, such as Scrum and XP. Agile methodologies have become popular alternatives to traditional waterfall project management because they can deliver value faster and make it easier to keep the solution aligned with business needs.
Going over the waterfall A traditional waterfall approach to program management starts with gathering and documenting business requirements, which then are translated from business documentation to IT designs and ultimately to coded implementations. This approach has several problems, however:
✓ It’s subject to analysis paralysis, in which people spend inordinate time documenting as-is and to-be policies and procedures in great detail.
✓ The plans can be so long and complicated that almost no one can understand all of them, so business people have trouble judging whether the plans actually meet all their needs.
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✓ Translating business requirements to IT designs and then to programmed code is a process that’s subject to mis understanding and error. When errors are discovered, they can cause costly delays.
✓ The overall process can take so long that the new system is obsolete before it’s delivered.
Staying agile Although organizations can use the traditional waterfall approach to manage a DCM project, few of them do. Rather, they break the initiative into a series of slivers, or phased functional deliveries (see Figure 5-1).
Source: Pegasystems.
Figure 5-1: W aterfall versus agile program methodology.
A sliver isn’t just any old fragment of an initiative. A sliver has the following characteristics:
✓ It delivers substantial, measurable, and stand-alone value to the business. Even if it’s limited in scope, what a sliver does must be useful and important.
✓ Typically, it’s ready for production one to three months from the day you begin gathering requirements.
✓ It builds toward the ultimate goals of the DCM initiative. An auto insurance claims case life cycle, for example, typically moves through five milestones: assignment, initial contact, evaluation, resolution, and closure. A first sliver may focus on
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just one milestone of the case life cycle for the most common policy types.
No matter what business problem you choose to tackle in your first sliver, use your DCM system to begin gathering metrics on cases as they move across the entire case life cycle. These metrics help you discover problem areas and decide what to improve next.
Measuring and Improving As you start to deliver your first slivers of functionality in a DCM system, a picture of your organization’s performance and opportunities for improvement will emerge:
✓ Baseline process metrics: How much work (for instance, volume of claims and their dollar value) is being done? How fast (overall cycle times and steps along the way)? Does work get stuck? How long? How frequently? With what impact to the business? Why?
✓ Case worker performance: How well are teams and individuals performing? Are they matched to their tasks? Are they focused on priority business? Are they doing highvalue work? Are they waiting for others to finish their work before they can do their own? Are they escalating work? Why?
✓ The cost of errors: How often are mistakes happening where rework is required? For what kind of work? Why are the mistakes happening? What impact do these errors have on the business?
✓ Your customers’ experience: Are customer questions answered and problems resolved accurately and efficiently — in a single call, if possible? Why not?
Using the operational dashboard A DCM system has built-in business activity monitoring capabilities that help you gather and report on these measures of the business and guide your focus for improvement. Figure 5-2 shows an example of an operational dashboard.
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Source Pegasystems.
Figure 5-2: D CM operational dashboard.
Targeting DCM improvements In general, DCM-based improvements fall into three categories:
✓ Rationalization: Rationalization improvements focus on productive use of resources, ensuring that people’s work is matched to their skills, that priority work is done first, and that system or organizational bottlenecks don’t clog the works.
✓ Facilitation: Facilitation improvements boost workers’ productivity by connecting them to the information and people they need to get their work done more efficiently. The DCM system facilitates faster, smarter decisionmaking by pulling and analyzing data from other systems and then reporting that data to workers in the context of their work.
Collaboration can take the form of subcases assigned to individuals or teams, with follow-up automatically assured by the system. Or collaboration can be informal, facilitated by social collaboration tools that locate people who have the information or skills needed for a quick resolution of a problem.
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✓ Automation: Through the use of business process, business rules, and analytics, work that formerly required a human operator can be automated. An insurance company might, for example, use a DCM-based adjudication system to automatically repair more than 90 percent of erroneous claims and divert its staff to work on high-value or unusual cases that require special treatment and judgment. People tend to think of business improvements — rationalization, facilitation, and automation — in the terms closest to their own experience. No single approach is best; usually, a combination of approaches is most effective. Be pragmatic; let the metrics you collect be your guide.
As long as the business keeps changing, a DCM system is never “done.” You continue measuring its performance, discovering new opportunities to improve operating performance or introduce new capabilities, and adapting it to meet changing business conditions.
Reinforce adoption by using system-generated metrics so that everyone can see the results. Everyone can be proud to be part of a change that results in significant improvements in customer satisfaction and business performance.
Reusing, Customizing, and Repeating DCM solutions created for a single line of business, department, or geography can be reused and customized for other parts of the business. To do this, design a layered business architecture, and define shared policies and procedures that apply everywhere. Then customize these policies and procedures to meet the needs of each business group. This layered approach to business architecture creates many opportunities to simplify the business. Simpler is better, because it’s more consistent for the customer and more efficient to run.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition Notice, though, that simple solutions may be too simple; they may gloss over important differences in how business is done in different regions, channels, or lines of business. The layered approach (see Figure 5-3 for an illustration of how this was done for a global insurance company) keeps things simple while managing this diversity.
Source Pegasystems.
Figure 5-3: R eusing, customizing, and repeating with a layered business architecture.
Potential simplification strategies include
✓ Centralize purchasing for greater buying leverage while allowing business units and regions to purchase locally to meet specialized needs.
✓ Simplify your product offerings by eliminating unnecessary variants or redundant lines.
✓ Streamline the customer experience by simplifying and automating the end-to-end processes of onboarding, ordering, and service, no matter where customers are located and no matter what products they use. Ensure convenience and consistency across channels (mobile, call center, web, branch, and so on).
✓ Rationalize work, automate common tasks, and intelligently guide workers to handle more difficult and varied tasks than they could before. This often makes it possible to improve your customer experience in retail branches and to consolidate back-office processing centers.
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The “start small, win fast” philosophy applies not only to your first DCM initiative, but also to the replication of that success to other parts of the business. Build momentum in a global transformation program by proving success in one region or line of the business; then extend it to the rest.
Scaling Success The people who have DCM skills will become increasingly important as the scope of your initiative grows, whether they’re formally part of your IT team or your business organization (refer to “Understanding Roles and Responsibilities” earlier in this chapter). Staff your first projects with a combination of internal personnel, consultants from the DCM vendor, and DCM vendorcertified consultants from third-party services companies. Over time, you can cultivate your in-house capability with this experience and knowledge gained from the vendor. These people drive and support the strategic adoption of DCM in your organization, and ensure that success is scalable and repeatable. Often, organizations start with informal communities of practice — groups of people who use DCM and voluntarily set up the infrastructure needed to share ideas and materials. As DCM use grows, however, set up a formal center of excellence (CoE) to ensure that necessary resources for large-scale use are available: A CoE does the following things:
✓ Supports all lines of business
✓ Creates and maintains policies and standards
✓ Centrally manages key assets, frameworks, services, and tools
✓ Facilitates collaborative DCM requirement-gathering/ design sessions
✓ Provides expert services to DCM projects
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If you’re using DCM across an organization with distinct needs that vary by line of business or geography, you should establish a federated CoE model, with a central CoE supporting local CoEs inside those groups. The local CoEs own the assets specific to their lines of business and manage local programs and their rollouts.
Don’t underestimate the time and resources required for knowledge transfer of DCM business and technology practices from vendors and service partners. Training and hands-on project experience are critical. If trained staff members move on to new projects, you have to start training a new group for the next phase of your DCM initiative. Plan ahead with your vendors to ensure continuity of service.
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Chapter 6
DCM in Action In This Chapter ▶ Seeing the broad range of DCM applications ▶ Addressing real-world business challenges with DCM
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his chapter provides eight case studies of large organizations using dynamic case management (DCM) to get work done in a broad range of industries, as well as the public sector. We hope that at least one of these examples will strike close to home for you.
This Flight Is Not Delayed You may not think of an airplane as being a case, but getting a flight to land and take off on time is definitely a piece of work that delivers a meaningful business outcome. DCM manages core operations of a UK-based airport — one of the world’s busiest — serving 70 million passengers annually. Since the airport launched a DCM-based system to manage aircraft turnaround, on-time departures have increased from 67 percent to 91 percent. The moment an airplane enters UK airspace and registers with air traffic control, a new case is created. A case is also created for the corresponding departing flight on that airplane. The DCM system orchestrates the complex work that leads to that plane’s departing on its next flight. The DCM case workers are all the people who collaborate in this work: airline and airport personnel; air traffic controllers; stand planners and managers; flight crew managers; cleaning, repair, and refueling crews; and baggage handlers. The DCM system orchestrates and guides their actions to
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition minimize turnaround time based on the complex interplay of airplane status, gate and crew resources, and inevitable disruptions (bad weather, mechanical problems, delayed arrivals, and so on). Many of the events that affect each case come from systems that monitor plane and ground operations. Fueling systems automatically detect when they start fueling a plane, for example; baggage handling systems track the status of bags; and events are sent from air traffic control as the planes enter and leave airspace. All these events are correlated and managed by the DCM system, which provides a single dashboard for monitoring the status of flights in the airport. Figure 6-1 shows an overview of the airport’s DCM system.
Source Pegasystems.
Figure 6-1: D CM used to optimize airport operations.
One Claim to Rule Them All Insurance claims represent classic examples of DCM. Each claim drives a series of tasks — sometimes automated, sometimes manual, and occasionally ad hoc — that collect the information and documentation necessary to pay the claim.
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One of the world’s biggest global insurance companies uses DCM to serve its 70 million customers in more than 100 countries across 90 types of insurance. By using DCM as the platform for its claims system, the company reduced claimhandling cycle time by a staggering 30 percent. Before introducing DCM, each country ran its own independent claim operations. The firm’s operations were so fragmented across countries and product lines that the company couldn’t find economies of scale. It had to find a way to standardize and consolidate global processes while retaining the distinct country-level capabilities and entrepreneurship needed to compete with local insurance companies. The company solved this problem using a layered business architecture (refer to Figure 5-3), in which standard policies and procedures are shared across product lines, geographies, and functions. Local policies and procedures representing the differences from the standard processes are layered on top. With this approach, the company gets the benefits of standardized processes (control, efficiency, visibility, and consistency) but still has the flexibility needed to meet local requirements. Claims adjusters can expedite claims to the right resources at the right time to deliver optimal outcomes.
Insurance companies measure profitability via what’s known as the combined ratio — the ratio of claims losses plus operating expenses divided by income from premium payments. The lower the combined ratio is, the more profitable the business is. The company’s DCM-based claims system improved the operational efficiency of the organization, resulting in a 10-point reduction in the combined ratio for individual lines of business.
Comfort and Confidence for the Elderly Just one fall can be devastating for an elderly person, who can be disoriented or severely injured. A global healthcare company brings comfort and confidence to 7 million subscribers by continually monitoring their well-being and bringing them help when needed. When a customer contacts this company for assistance, his or her well-being depends on how quickly and efficiently the request can be processed.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition A subscriber can contact the company’s call center at any time by pressing an emergency button on a pendant. In addition, the pendant’s technology places the call automatically if it senses a fall. The DCM system brings up the subscriber’s profile so that the agent can quickly assess the situation and then — based on the specific circumstances — contact a neighbor, family member, or emergency services. It also follows up to confirm that help has arrived. Through DCM, the company ensures that best practices are followed and the work is completed. See Figure 6-2.
Source Pegasystems.
Figure 6-2: E nsuring rapid response whenever the need arises.
Citizen Case DCM has been put to use in the public sector as well. This case looks at how a U.S. state government uses DCM to reduce labor-intensive tasks, save tax revenue, and improve services to its citizens. The state employed an agile approach to transform its operations and is now achieving service levels comparable to those in the private sector. Historically, state employees performed time-consuming, errorprone, ad hoc manual processes to fix incomplete or incorrect unemployment insurance claims, which were blocked. Fixing the problems often required multiple interactions with citizens, with other managers, and sometimes with other agencies. As a result, many constituents were left without results, resolution, or even notification. The state’s first DCM project reduced the time it takes to successfully resolve blocked unemployment-insurance claims. These claims can be submitted via the state’s call center or its online self-service portal. With DCM, the state has significantly improved the user experience for constituents as well
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as its own employees, who now get consolidated, role-based access to blocked claims and all associated interactions. As a result, claims are being processed faster, everyone is notified about status, and there’s less rework and escalation. Everyone wins.
Getting on Board A Singapore-headquartered global bank used DCM to transform its retail customer on-boarding experience. As a result, the bank leapfrogged its competition to become its market’s most recommended bank, with 40 percent higher customer satisfaction scores than its rivals. On-boarding is what the bank calls a “moment of truth,” because the experience sets the tone for the new customer’s relationship with the bank. If the on-boarding goes well, the bank earns the right to do more business with the customer. Upgrading to DCM was critical to improving the bank’s net promoter score and competitiveness. Before installing DCM, account opening was a cumbersome manual process comprising forms to fill out and 150 tasks to perform. It was slow and impersonal. Streamlining this process was just the starting point for the bank’s vision for improvement. It used DCM not only to simplify on-boarding, but to turn the process into a collaborative and engaging experience for a new client. On-boarding, the bank realized, should be more than a burden to be minimized; it should be a positive experience that would help the bank stand out in the marketplace. Before DCM, the computer sat between the client and the bank adviser. Now, the adviser sits next to the client, and they share the screen. Together, they work with the DCM-based system, and move the on-boarding case from start to end. The DCM software guides them through the case lifecycle, as it brings together the people and information needed to reach the optimal set of services for the client. As a result, the bank has made the on-boarding experience more pleasant for everyone involved, and also increased the number of products sold during on-boarding by 10 percent, and increased the activation of add-on features by as much as 50 percent.
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Keeping Patients Well A key challenge for pharmaceutical companies is ensuring that patients adhere to the drug and rehabilitation programs recommended by their doctors. Patients who don’t comply with their programs and prescription regimes have high rates of relapse and related health problems, often resulting in expensive and painful readmissions, additional procedures, more costly prescription medications, and longer rehabilitation times. This case study is about a U.S. customer care services company that provides management of complex and sensitive interactions for more than 700 pharmaceutical, health care, consumer, and high-technology brands. Using DCM, the company was able to roll out a patient-adherence solution. In just 12 weeks, it leveraged a layered architecture to provide a specialized version of the solution for each of the product brands it services. Today, DCM manages each patient’s prescribed program and trigger outbound communications to ensure that patients are staying on track. As a result, patients are more consistently following prescribed programs and are staying healthier, which reduces readmissions and the overall cost of care.
The company implemented another DCM application to manage its access and reimbursement program. This solution improves health outcomes and manages costs by helping patients obtain important medications. The cases manage a patient’s application for financial assistance in receiving vaccines and other treatments. As a result, the firm experienced a greater than 10 percent lift in vaccine access and reimbursement, which directly translates to healthier patients.
Keeping Patients Satisfied This health insurance company manages the public health care programs that serve 2.8 million members in 12 U.S. states. The company uses a DCM system to provide highquality customer service, improve compliance, and reduce costs in managing more than 425,000 cases per year.
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Its DCM capability is especially valuable for managing member appeals and grievances. Typical questions and comments include:
✓ Haven’t I met my out-of-pocket limit?
✓ I already paid for that service.
✓ I’m not satisfied with the care I received. Each question or dispute is managed as a case. The company’s DCM system ensures rapid, accurate response to all types of questions and disputes about health care payments, ensuring that agents meet service-level agreements, prioritize requests properly, and follow best practices. Members have multiple layers of recourse, which vary by state and by type of insurance. In addition, regulations govern the time and form of response. These rules and regulations are too complex for customer service representatives to navigate efficiently. The firm’s DCM solution ensures that the company meets all its regulatory requirements without requiring customer service representatives to know every regulatory permutation. With DCM, the company can deliver more consistent service, which results in happier customers, as well as reduced training and servicing costs.
How May I Help You? One of Canada’s largest global banks — serving 15 million customers in 47 countries — installed a DCM system to help its 30,000 staff members handle customer inquiries. As a result, the bank has cut the time to resolve requests from 5 days to 30 minutes. The firm’s DCM system runs on the desktop computers of all of its customer-facing employees. Through this system, staff members can capture customer requests directly at the point of contact. Customer requests no longer get lost in email and other siloed systems that previously managed this work. The DCM system gives representatives intelligent guidance, helping them resolve customer questions at the moment of contact. It also manages the complex front-to-back office flow of work required to handle cases that can’t be resolved
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition immediately. Refer to Figure 6-3. Remarkably, the DCM system was so intuitive and easy to use that no training was required for most staff members.
Source Pegasystems.
Figure 6-3: F aster and higher quality customer service for banking clients around the world.
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Chapter 7
Nine Best Practices of DCM In This Chapter ▶ Planning your work, working your plan ▶ Monitoring your progress ▶ Keeping up with technology
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e’ve picked up a few tricks while working on dynamic change management (DCM) projects. Following these simple best practices will help ensure the success of your own DCM projects.
Review Past Work The best way to understand a case is to look at a piece of work that has already been completed. Completed work shows you the data that needs to be collected, the questions that need to be answered, and the tasks that need to be performed. Look at finished forms, updated records in legacy systems, and the notes of case workers. All these records from previously completed pieces of work are your clues about what your case types need to look like. For more on case types, see Chapter 3.
Get the Decision-Makers in the Room Defining a DCM application is an exercise in collaboration. You’re using visual tools to bring IT staff and business people together to define the solution, living the agile dream. For this
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition method to work, however, you must assemble all the decisionmakers in one room during the first weeks of requirements gathering. That way, when a question arises about how a case should be processed or where a piece of data should reside, it can be answered then and there. If you don’t have decisionmakers in the room when defining your DCM application, you’ll be constantly waiting for approval, and your agility will be compromised.
Look at Work through Your Customers’ Eyes Your DCM system must reflect your customers’ experience. To ensure that it does, try looking at the work from your customers’ perspective. See how they perceive the outcome you’re trying to achieve, as well as what they’re trying to achieve at this stage of the customer journey. This method is often called taking an outside-in or end-to-end view. (It’s known in Lean and Six Sigma circles as hearing the voice of the customer.) A business owner of a DCM solution said, “When you stride on the cow path every day, it’s very easy to want to repave it.” By taking an end-to-end, customer-centric perspective, you ensure that you aren’t rebuilding your company’s silos into the DCM application, but crossing the silos to ensure the best possible customer experience.
Report on Your Goals An enterprise-class DCM system automatically generates key metrics and reports as part of orchestrating processes and resolving cases. You should refine these reports as part of your project so you can see how well you’re achieving your goals. If your goal is better throughput, your DCM application should include a report that shows trending information about throughput. If your goal is an improved customer satisfaction score, report on that.
Measure the initial conditions as a baseline before implementing your solution. Then you can use your DCM reports to indicate the changes you’ve made relative to that baseline.
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Act Project, Think Program Each DCM project should focus on delivering meaningful results quickly, which means acting project: limiting your scope, starting small, and tying your actions and the things you build to the specific goals of your immediate project. Each project implementation should be set in the context of the broader program or higher-level program initiative. Take advantage of the power of DCM by building and leveraging reuse. Perhaps the case types, integration points, and business rules you’re building could be reused in other parts of your organization for other work types and with other product lines. Or you may be able to reuse rules and services created by other projects. By thinking program, you can clear the path from project to business transformation.
Avoid Jargon Business solutions implemented in software often degenerate into technospeak and IT jargon, which is expeditious for techies but unintelligible to everyone else. Because DCM is a business-facing, business-friendly, and business-accessible environment, it’s important to use business language. When you define your case types, make sure that the names you give them describe work that your users and their customers can understand. Use real names — such as Insurance Quote, Order Fulfillment, and Resolution — that are clear and devoid of technical and process jargon. (See Chapter 3 for more information on case types.)
If you can’t come up with a jargon-free name for your cases, you’re probably not defining the right things.
Wrap and Renew Think about how DCM can extend your existing systems and how you can leverage the investment and intellectual capital in your existing environment. A quality DCM platform enables
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition you to wrap around existing systems and provides case-based constructs without requiring duplication or disposal of what you already have. Most legacy systems are called systems of record (SORs; see Chapter 4). These systems transact and record base information but are too constrained or complex to extend to casetype systems. DCM solutions are designed to help you create new capabilities, known as systems of innovation or systems of differentiation, in conjunction with your existing systems. Focus on opportunities to wrap the legacy systems and renew your business with the capabilities of DCM.
Think Digital Digital technology — mobile devices, social media, Big Data, cloud computing, and so on — is changing how employees and customers engage with your business. Your DCM application must engage this digital world, which means thinking about mobile users, engaging with cases via social media and collaboration, feeding and learning from Big Data systems, and operating your DCM in the cloud. If you don’t incorporate new technologies into your applications, you may find your projects outdated before they even start.
Learn by Doing You can’t become a DCM expert just by reading a book; you have to do the work. Make mistakes; learn from them; try again. To try DCM right now, take a piece of work you do every day and break it into case types, stages, and processes. (One product manager sat down with his daughter and diagrammed the life cycle of the The Very Hungry Caterpillar.) Find opportunities in the world you live in and the work you do, and put them into the DCM metaphors of cases, stages, and milestones. Start thinking like a DCM expert, and you’ll become one soon enough.
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Chapter 8
Ten DCM Pit falls to Avoid In This Chapter ▶ Excluding business representatives ▶ Losing control of change ▶ Underestimating your needs
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void these missteps, and make your dynamic case management (DCM) initiative a success.
Leaving Business Out of Design The success of your DCM project depends on effective collaboration among business leaders, subject-matter experts (SMEs), and IT professionals (see Chapter 5). If you don’t see business people engaged in the work-design discussions, your DCM initiative will most certainly fail. Also, don’t use traditional techniques to capture requirements and then later try to transfer them into the system. If you do, you miss out on one of DCM’s biggest benefits. DCM tools capture business requirements in a way that both business people and technology professionals can see and understand, and it translates those requirements directly to implementation for rapid validation and iterative improvement.
Use these tools to engage business people and SMEs in the process and gain their buy-in. People are more open to changing the way they work when they’ve been involved in planning the changes and believe that they’ve been heard and understood.
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Not Getting Executive Support A project’s executive sponsor plays a critical role in defining overall business objectives, and when that sponsor stays engaged, he or she can make sure that the right resources are applied, milestones are achieved, and midcourse corrections are implemented as necessary. Often, however, an executive kicks off a project and disappears, not to be seen again until trouble occurs. Not having an executive sponsor involved as a true member of the project is a pitfall you must avoid. Tell your sponsor exactly what you need and expect. He or she must be an engaged, visible supporter of your initiatives, promoting its goals and successes at the executive level, and helping you handle the politics of change. With an active executive at the helm, your project has a much greater chance of success.
Taking On Too Much “A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step,” wrote the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu. With that in mind, you should envision your DCM project as being a journey of many steps. Unlike old-fashioned projects and systems, which have huge fixed costs and have to be big to justify the investment, DCM solutions can be implemented in agile, digestible bites. With DCM, you should start small, win fast, and grow from success. Projects should have simple, well-defined objectives that are important to business goals, with a clear and straightforward path to achieving tangible benefits.
Paving the Cow Paths The twisty roads of downtown Boston are legacies of former times. Boston literally did pave its old cow paths. What worked in the past, however, is hardly optimal for meeting today’s needs. Likewise, if you automate a process that was once sufficient but is no longer satisfactory, you have a bad automated process. Instead, use DCM to measure the entire life cycle of
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work, and apply process improvement methodologies (such as Lean or Six Sigma) and tools (such as the 5 Whys) to isolate sources of waste and variation. Typically, business processes that have many touch points and handoffs represent lowhanging fruit and are good candidates for optimization.
Inviting Analysis Paralysis Don’t attempt to diagram all the detailed process flows of as-is and to-be operations and then define programs and projects to bridge the gaps. If you do, you’ll be wasting time in analysis paralysis — time that would be much better spent implementing the next incremental improvement. First, leverage the outcome-driven and top-down approach of DCM to capture objectives; then create the high-level milestones for work that will achieve them. Get metrics to guide work and then pragmatically add rationalization, facilitation, and automation to improve customer experience and operational efficiency.
Schedule frequent reporting sessions to gain user feedback and educate your constituents. Test early in the project life cycle to drive higher levels of product quality and gain additional user feedback beyond the reporting sessions.
Losing Control of Change DCM is best implemented in agile change cycles, so be mindful of the importance of governance and change control. You implement and change in an organized way. Think through the authorizations and responsibilities involved with changing business rules and other DCM system elements, and use the DCM system to control them. A DCM center of excellence can be your clearinghouse for project governance issues.
Not Being Agile If your DCM project is your company’s first exposure to agile methodology, don’t underestimate the operational and behavioral changes required by development teams and managers. Seek advice from, and enlist the help of, agile experts from your DCM vendor and service partners. These experts have
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition guided many other companies through the Agile transition and can help you plan for success. Plan how you’ll integrate the new practices into your existing development culture. Otherwise, your agile strategy will fail, and teams will revert to the waterfall approach (see Chapter 5).
Skimping on the Skills Budget Unless you want to rely exclusively on the expertise of your DCM vendor and its partners, don’t skimp on your investment in training, mentoring, coaching, and hands-on experience for your own people. An in-house center of excellence (see Chapter 5) will ensure that you develop self-sufficiency and promote repeatable process and asset reuse.
Underestimating Data Integration Challenges Data is everywhere — and if you haven’t heard, it’s getting bigger. Data integration is a discipline of its own, and if you underestimate it, you won’t achieve the wrap-and-renew leverage that’s the core of DCM. Consult your vendor to ensure that you understand the performance, scalability, integrity, and security implications. Prioritize your data needs, and don’t underestimate the potential complexity of data integration if you have multiple systems and data sources.
Ignoring Advice Heed the advice of your DCM provider and its certified partners. These people know the details of the methods and technology of DCM, so they can help you find the projects that suit the solution, use the products properly, and have the resources you need to be successful.
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Appendix A
Resources In This Chapter ▶ Finding help for your DCM journey ▶ Online sources of information on DCM
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f course, there’s more to dynamic case management (DCM) than what’s in this book. This chapter is chockfull of helpful places you can go to find out more.
Blogs and Community Forums
✓ The Pega community blog is a wealth of information — not just on DCM, but also within the context of DCM with Business Process Management (BPM). The Pega blog also addresses implementations and best practices. See http://pega.com/community/pega-blog.
✓ LinkedIn has two forums within their BPM community that address DCM. See the BPM Guru and the DCM forum within the BPM Group.
✓ Industry guru Jim Sinur covers DCM in his blog. Go to jimsinur.blogspot.com.
✓ Independent business and technology analyst Sandy Kemsley maintains a blog called column2.com where she addresses topics related to BPM and DCM.
✓ Some analyst firms also have blog sites. Check out Forrester, Gartner, and IDC.
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Web Resources Of course you can always Google the term “dynamic case management.” As of this writing, you’ll see some 278,000 responses. From the best of the web, here are some suggestions.
✓ Pega describes DCM in detail on its web site. Check out pega.com/case.
✓ Pega also has some great YouTube videos on DCM. Watching these will really help you understand more about DCM. You can go to YouTube at youtube.com and search on Pega Dynamic Case Management. Here are the best of DCM from Pega:
• A great little three-minute animation video describes DCM. See it at: www.youtube.com/watch?v= qHwSM3eR384
• Dr. Setrag Khoshafian, known as “The BPM Professor,” has a lecture series on BPM. Episode 9 is dedicated to DCM. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9No6sFW6_XM
• Pega’s Senior Vice President for Product Manage ment, Kerim Akgonul, delivers a keynote address on BPM and DCM. See this 27-minute video on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1M7Oz3v5Kw
• The Heathrow case study discussed in Chapter 6 is summarized in a video called “BAA – Delivering a World-Class Passenger Journey with Pega.” You can see it online at www.youtube.com/watch? v=sgZ8F6XqoKc
✓ BPM.com is an international forum that covers dynamic and adaptive case management. Included are blogs, whitepapers, webcasts, and more.
✓ The Process Excellence Network is a global community of over 80,000 professionals, executives, and business leaders seeking to improve performance through process excellence. Visit their website at processexcellence network.com and search “dynamic case management” to find articles and information on DCM.
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Books and eBooks You can also look for books that cover business process management that discuss DCM in detail.
✓ Build for Change: Revolutionizing Customer Engagement through Continuous Digital Innovation, Alan Trefler, John Wiley & Sons, 2014. This is a transformational look at how digital enterprises are leveraging case management along with other disruptive technologies to better engage their customers, simplify their operations, and compete in a fast changing, digital world.
✓ Intelligent Business Process Management – The Next Wave, Dr. Setrag Khoshafian, Pegasystems, 2014. This groundbreaking study of intelligent BPM (iBPM) explains how DCM is key to transforming your business.
✓ Business Process Management – Taming Complexity with Intelligent Agents, Jim Sinur, James Odell, and Peter Fingar, MKPress, 2013. This book describes how the intelligent agent-based approach will be the next direction for intelligent BPM technology.
✓ How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done, L. Fischer (Ed.), Future Strategies Inc., 2013. A collection of excellent articles and papers on dynamic and adaptive case management.
✓ Taming the Unpredictable, L. Fischer (Ed.), Future Strategies Inc., 2012. A similar compendium from 2012. Other helpful books in the For Dummies series by the authors you might find helpful:
✓ Six Sigma For Dummies by Craig Gygi and Bruce Williams.
✓ Lean For Dummies by Natalie Sayer and Bruce Williams.
Conferences The conferences covering business process management now also address DCM. Here are some of the better ones.
✓ Gartner BPM Summit (gartner.com): See industry thought leaders, customers, and vendors; a great forum for architects and business leaders.
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✓ Forrester Technology Leadership Forum (forrester. com): See leading analyst presentations, case studies, and network with industry leaders in one location; a good conference for all roles in a DCM initiative.
✓ BPM.com hosts and annual BPM and Case Management Global Summit. See more at their website bpm.com.
✓ Process Excellence Network events are both global and topical — covering methods, technologies, and industries. See more at processexcellencenetwork.com/ events.
✓ PegaWORLD (pegaworld.com): Pega holds an annual global customer and partner conference, attended by thousands of business and technology leaders from all industries. It’s not to be missed!
Consultancies DCM is a transformative capability. To leverage the power of DCM, the leading business and information technology consultancies have developed innovation and implementation practices around DCM. Many of them have specialized capability implementing Pega DCM.
✓ Accenture has an Intelligent Case Management practice. Visit their website at www.accenture.com/us-en/ Pages/service-defense-intelligence-casemanagement-solution.aspx. In addition, Accenture has specialized capability in Pega DCM. You can read their position paper here: www.accenture.com/ SiteCollectionDocuments/PDF/DeliveringBusiness-Process-Automation-ExcellencePegasystems-Technology.pdf
✓ Capgemini has a BPM practice that includes a specialty in DCM. Read their whitepaper here: www.capgemini. com/resource-file-access/resource/pdf/ Case_Management_Managing_chaos_unstructured_ processes_and_dynamic_BPM.pdf
✓ Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) also has DCM practice capabilities. Read about TCS and DCM at www.tcs.com/ resources/white_papers/Pages/Dynamic-CaseManagement-Better-Decisions-Lowered-Risks. aspx
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✓ Cognizant also has Pega DCM expertise. You can watch a YouTube video about Cognizant-Pega DCM at youtube. com/watch?v=yLD5eV53Xvc
✓ Wipro implements Pega BPM and DCM solutions. Watch Ramakrishna Srinivasa, the global head of Wipro’s Pega practice, talk about it on YouTube. youtube.com/ watch?v=IR_YQeFYH4M
✓ Tech Mahindra is another global consultancy implementing DCM solutions. See more YouTube interviews at youtube. com/watch?v=ZUM2kxXoXFg and youtube.com/ watch?v=exx5OXdm8LM
Analysts Professional analysts are following DCM closely. They’re seeing the benefits and the value, and are in position to offer their advice and expertise. Take advantage of this expert knowledge from the best in the business.
✓ Gartner (gartner.com). Gartner covers a broad range of technologies and offerings as well as a regular review of the vendor landscape. They publish an in-depth analysis of the business process management market, including DCM, in their Magic Quadrant review.
✓ Forrester (forrester.com). Forrester conducts research on DCM and publishes the results in the Forrester Wave. Read the Wave on DCM at forrester.com/The+Forre ster+Wave+Dynamic+Case+Management+Q1+2014/ fulltext/-/E-RES111321
✓ Ovum (ovum.com). See Ovum’s extensive research on DCM at ovum.com/?s=dynamic+case+management
✓ MWD Advisors (mwdadvisors.com). MWD has extensive research on DCM; go to their website and use their search capabilities to find papers and webinars.
✓ Delphi Group (delphigroup.com). Delphi’s founder and CEO Thomas Koulopoulos has a lot to say about DCM.
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Pega Pegasystems (www.pega.com) is a great resource for info about DCM. Pega offers education, training, resources, worldclass partners and consultants, and a fully-integrated suite of products to implement process intelligence.
Other Technology Vendors Because DCM is a breakthrough capability, leaders across the technology vendor community have invested significantly in developing tools and systems for implementing DCM. Each vendor brings its own approach and perspectives — based on its product families, technical architectures, and their understanding of what’s best for the marketplace. These vendors want you to be informed, and they will happily spend time and effort informing you. Some of the other vendors with DCM offerings include:
✓ IBM. See IBM’s perspective on DCM by reading its study. www.ibm.com/dynamic_case_management
✓ EMC offers solutions for DCM. Visit its website at www. emc.com/campaign/dynamic-case-mgmt/index.htm
✓ Oracle has DCM capabilities. Look for it at oracle.com
Look Around You! DCM is becoming a business reality, and you’ll find information, knowledge, and experience all around you. Business people and IT professionals in your organization likely know about DCM. Change agents and champions are interested in what DCM can do. Use your network and ask about DCM.
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Appendix B
Glossar y
S
ee a complete list of terms at dcm4dummies.com/ glossary.
ad hoc task: An unplanned task, defined in the moment of need and performed in real-time rather than as something designed into systems and applications. analytics: Discovery, interpretation, and presentation of meaningful patterns in data. Business process analytics, for example, finds bottlenecks and other inefficiencies in how work is done; Big Data analytics uses large customer, product and market data sets to optimize product or service offerings; and real-time analytics produces results as events occur. business process: A sequential, deterministic, and predictable series of steps (both manual and automated) that delivers a result. business process management (BPM): The methods, techniques, and tools used to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving people, organizations, systems, information, and things. business rules: The formal codification of business policies and actions into operational practices that are maintained independently of application code. case: The representation of a piece of work that delivers a business outcome. case management: A software-based approach to managing the creation and resolution of cases. case owner: The person most responsible for ensuring that a case is completed with the desired outcome. case type: The definition of a category of work. These materials are © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
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Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition child case: A case that delivers an incremental business outcome, contributing to the completion of a parent case. See also parent case. design by doing: A process of defining the steps and processes involved in doing a piece of work by doing that work and letting the DCM system capture the process on the fly. dynamic case management (DCM): A software-based approach to managing, improving, and automating work. instance: A specific example of a repeatable template or pattern. model: An abstracted and summarized description of reality in a visualization that accentuates key features and their relationships. Business policies and procedures are easier to understand and agree on when they’re represented as visual models. orchestration: The automated arrangement, coordination, execution, and management of complex computer applications, systems, integration, and services. parent case: A case that delivers a business outcome that’s dependent on the completion of subordinate business outcomes (its child cases). predictive analytics: Algorithms applied to patterns of information about activities and behaviors that serve as a statistically valid basis for predicting potential future outcomes. process: A set of activities, material, and/or information flow that transforms a set of inputs into defined outputs. stages: Representations of the high-level flow of a case, usually demarcated by milestones. subject: The person or thing the case is being performed for. unstructured process: A series of tasks that may be performed in any order, with tasks added or removed as needed. work: Activities that directly or indirectly add value to the products and services provided to customers. workflow: An orchestrated and repeatable pattern of business activity enabled and driven by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information.
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About the Authors Don Schuerman: Don Schuerman is chief technology officer and vice president of product marketing at Pegasystems. He has more than 15 years’ experience designing and implementing business rules and analytics technologies, and has provided technology and architecture consulting to senior business and technology executives of Fortune 500 organizations. He holds a BS in Physics and Philosophy from Boston College and, in his side job as improv comic, has performed in shows and festivals around the globe. Ken Schwarz: Ken Schwarz is product marketing director for Pegasystems’ business process management (BPM) and dynamic case management (DCM) solutions. He is an expert on enterprise middleware and its application to business transformation and competitive strategy. He has a BA in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, with a specialty in Japan. Bruce Williams: Bruce Williams is vice president and businessline leader for manufacturing and high technology at Pegasystems. He has a BS in Physics from the University of Colorado, as well as graduate degrees in Engineering, Computing, and Technical Management from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Colorado. He is co-author of Six Sigma For Dummies, The Six Sigma Workbook For Dummies, Lean For Dummies, BPM Basics For Dummies, and Process Intelligence For Dummies.
Dedications Don Schuerman: To Alan, Leon, Walter, Ed, Colm, Robert, Ben, and all the others I have worked with and learned from at Pega; and to Elyse, Greta, and Milo, whom I learn from every day. Ken Schwarz: To my wife, Yoko, my joy forever. Bruce Williams: To my wife and life partner, Barbi, for being so supportive and continuing to understand — going on more than ten years now — about my constantly writing these For Dummies books. Hey, I could stop any time if I really wanted to!
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Authors’ Acknowledgments The authors acknowledge Lauren St. Amand for her tireless efforts and dedication to producing this book. Special thanks to Eamonn Cheverton of the British Airports Authority for his brilliant foreword. We’d like to acknowledge our many DCM friends and colleagues at Pegasystems, especially Kerim Akgonul, Scott Andrick, Frank Apap, Tim Beachus, Chris Blatchly, Elaine Fearnley, Dennis Grady, Rich Jefferson, Adam Kenney, Setrag Khoshafian, Doug Kra, Cathy Novak, Drew Piekarski, John Petrolini, Paul Roeck, Susan Taylor, Tim Turbett, Melonie Warfel, Stephen Zisk, and the Delivery @ Pega team. Most important, we thank our inspirational founder and chief executive officer, Alan Trefler, for his insight and dedication to producing the finest enterprise business software development platform in the world.
These materials are © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
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