MSFT/BPM Session 2

The section session I attended was entitled "People-Read Processes with SharePoint Workflows and Forms Services" and was presented by Christian Stark, a Senior Product Manager for Microsoft.

The presenter gave a survey at the beginning and hinted that, if you met a certain criteria (which I did) that you may not want to sit through the session as it would likely be familiar material. In retrospect, I should have listened and looked for another session. The presentation wasn't wasted, just not full of "new" material.

Christian divided the session into two main sections - the first of which was slides and discussion while the second half focused on demos.

During the theory section, he mentioned a few things that seemed to resonate with me (presented below in no particular order):

• Most end-users want to "do their job" without being "encumbered" (or, at least not overly so) with processes
• Most IT users have the exact opposite desire... we want to lock users into a very specific process so we get accurate, consistent data and can properly execute the workflow
• A successful implementation will be (at least partially) characterized by:
  • IT successfully exposing the workflow endpoints directly in interfaces that the end users are already comfortable with (i.e. MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint).
  • Making the processes task-driven rather than email-driven --> takeaway: if you are going to send nag mails as part of the workflow, make sure that the email is directly actionable (i.e. includes a link, form, or button against which the user can immediately execute).

Objectives/Responsibilities on IT

• Simplify the human interactivity aspects of the workflow
• Simplify the data collection
• Simplify the participation
• Simplify the process management and monitoring