PegaWORLD Day 3: Agile Projects Highlighted

This year's agenda was dominated by presentations from and about JPMorganChase. Leaders from various business segments and functional specialties with the mega-bank were showcasing aspects of their PRPC implementation efforts of the past year. The results of their internal efforts—and Pega's concerted efforts to enable those internal efforts— are impressive. One of the key presentations highlighting success at the bank was delivered by Paul Kompare. Paul walked an audience of 50 through his experiences with agile project techniques supported by the new Direct Capture of Objectives (DCO) tools.

The project arc basically followed my usual pattern for BPM agility in three broad steps:

Automation	Flows	UI	Integration
Stupid	Simple	Ugly	Isolated
Stupid	Subtle	Ugly	Isolated
Smart	Subtle	Pretty	Connected

Here is how Paul described each of the three, monthly-long, project iterations that they completed.

• Happy Path Flows – Development of DCO Use Cases and subsequent implementation of the 'normal' course of a business process. These flows are usually the simplest, least controversial, and most heavily utilized process paths. Review with end-users and incorporate feedback.
  
• Addition of Exception and Secondary Flows – Development of additional DCO use cases and implementation of process paths that fail to satisfy some criteria for normal, expedited processing which often requires more complex manual interventions. Review with end-users and incorporate feedback.
  
• UI Improvements, Interfaces, and Reports – These refinements of existing flows to improve user experience, inject and generate live data, and provide task and transaction-level reporting is a follow-on activity.
  

The team reported that they were able to do far more with far less time using this approach. They were particularly impressed with the ability to cut out their typical lengthy requirements documentation phase which trafficked in varied MSWord templates ranging from 150 to 400 pages each. The requirements, he commented, were never quite right at the start of development and the business was punished for that through change orders. The iterative approach, on the other hand, allowed for reasonable degree of malleability through the process.

I was encouraged that Pega was taking pains to showcase successes for iterative project executions. We have certainly come to view iterative development as an internal competency and mainstream direction. The crowd at this conference session was enthusiastic about the result and curious about the ways that JPMC got started on this agile path. In the coming year, we should take care to reinforce our commitment to iterative approaches, embrace DCO in our processes, and evangelize the benefits to our sometimes nervous customers.

PegaWORLD Day 2: Key Themes

Listening to Alan Trefler, CEO of Pegasystems talk about what makes Pega special as a company, as a product, as a community is always inspiring. Every year, listening to the keynote presentations gives me reason to feel heartened about our mission and our alignment with Pegasystems as an organization. It also reminds me that there are overarching themes in our work that tend to get lost in the daily grind of project life. These are the major themes that Pega is featuring this year.

• Intent-driven User Experience – PRPC is not just a web application development environment. It is tuned to create directive processes which move a user and a task through specific focused steps along a well-defined path toward process completion. It is both constraining AND freeing. We need to remind ourselves that this is what BPM is about...enabling organizations to define and repeatably execute processes. This intent-driven approach to systems design is a radical shift for most users, but it is special and powerful.
  
• Process Automation – PRPC is not just about Process Management. Managed, intend-driven processes are important, but equally important is the application of automation of redundant tasks to remove the time and cost of their performance from the business model. The stand-out customers this year are presenting bold metrics that talk about taking 14 day processes to 14 minute processes—this transformation doesn't happen by simply putting prettier screens in front of the end-users. We need to make certain that we are thinking about using the machine's broad shoulders to lift the process burden from the backs of the user community—businesses can be transformed by this effect
  

We need rededicate ourselves to evangelizing these approaches in our engagements. We should not only be using the tools more skillfully than our competition, our vision for our customer's businesses needs to be complete. Our vision needs to be shared and realized. In so doing, we unlock the value trapped in the operations of the businesses and reinforce that our value transcends the speed of our typing.