Teamworks 6: The Collaboration Release

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By Dian Schaffhauser

In mid-May, when Lombardi refreshed Teamworks, the company also introduced a couple of add-on modules intended to enhance the collaboration capabilities of its business process management (BPM) suite.

This article provides a briefing on the new technology, based on an interview with Wayne Snell, senior director of marketing, and Marc Smith, director of marketing.

Tweaks to Teamworks: Wikis

If you're a fan of Web 2.0 -- particularly wikis -- you'll find the application of technologies in this latest release a great comfort.

Previous versions of Teamworks included the requisite online help; plus, the process author could add documentation to help users. But what about a way to capture those tiny nuggets of advice that the people performing that process day in and day out could offer? No way to add that easily. Version 6 now includes wiki technology that enables end users to provide their own input. According to Smith, users can embellish, fix and change steps as the process evolves. Designers and users can see what has been changed and who changed it.

Along the same lines, Lombardi hosts a private customer support site that includes discussion groups. When a Teamworks user clicks for help and enters a query, the program will search through the wiki to bring up help added by colleagues, plus go out to the support forums and bring back potentially useful information from there as well.

Performance Management

Key performance indicators (KPIs) in Teamworks let the user monitor how service levels are maintaining. But sometimes setting up those service level definitions is complex, since they can involve defining business rules using non-user-friendly programming. To ease the pain, the new release lets the user define triggers and events with a wizard.

Once the KPIs are set up, a performance server churns through the data about process performance. Newly available is the capacity to expose hotspots, areas that might be bottlenecks. "You can drill down for a particular group, to find out if they're overloaded or bottlenecks," said Smith. "Maybe they're working on five other processes and they're not spending enough time on processes you care about."

From the hotspot, the user can drill down to get at the detail of the process and its data points. As the user selects different SLAs and KPIs, the hotspots change. The idea is to enable the user to come up with reasons why something is happening -- orders are being rejected, approvals are being delayed and so on.

On top of that are data mining tools that actually recommend possible process optimization routes -- rules to be skipped over or rerouted -- that the user can then simulate. Once the simulation is done, the results can be compared to the production system results to elicit how the changes might actually affect performance, negatively or positively.

Figure 1: A comparison of the before and after impact on possible process improvements.

BPDM and Integration with Blueprint

Lombardi Chief Technology Officer Phil Gilbert has been a driving force in the definition of BPDM, the business process definition model recently ratified by OMG. While the modeling notation standard, BPMN, is better known (and being adopted in multiple BPM tools), it focuses on describing processes graphically. What some in the industry believe is missing is a way to define processes at the execution level. BPDM provides an XML-based execution notation. The idea is that eventually it will act as an interchange format among tools, so that processes can be moved from one BPM engine to another without great effort. For now Lombardi uses it as an interchange format between Teamworks and its Web service process modeling tool, Blueprint.

In Teamworks 6, the integration with Blueprint has been beefed up. Now users can "subscribe" to processes so they're notified when changes are made to the models in one tool or the other.

Along with that, the product includes a chat mechanism that lets Blueprint process authors communicate with Teamworks authors and vice versa.

Keeping Tabs on Virtual Organizations

New software release Teamworks for Organization Management addresses the need for companies to manage processes in organizational structures that don't follow typical patterns -- such as matrix or informal arrangements. For example, a process may require dynamic reporting structures depending on criteria. In the insurance business, a worker may be licensed to sell products in one state, but not another. In that case, the routing rules for a given process may need to be defined on the fly, depending on where the customer inquiry is coming from. Or a help desk may have level 1, 2 and 3 engineers, each with the ability to handle more or less complex support requests. As the trouble tickets arrive, they may be routed to one group over another, depending on who's available that day, where the requests originate or what the nature of the trouble is.

Figure 2: Setting up rules for virtual or dynamic teams.

Integration with Microsoft SharePoint

Lombardi has already shown its interest in playing nicely with Microsoft applications. Teamworks for Office 2003, launched in March 2006, and Teamworks for Office 2007, expected later this year, allow users to interact with the process tools through the programs they're already working in, particularly Outlook.

Now, new release Teamworks for SharePoint provides a way to manage ad hoc collaboration within a process. Smith described the scenario of hiring somebody. A step in that process might involve multiple people doing interviews with various candidates -- defined as a collaboration activity within the entire process. When the process reaches that activity, the software can create a SharePoint portal within Teamworks and send out email to the individuals doing the interviewing, providing a link to that workspace, which might offer a threaded discussion forum, for example.

The SharePoint site created by Teamworks includes the controls that the process owner needs to gain visibility into the process. When that person is ready to wrap up the collaboration activities and move onto the next step in the process, Teamworks will add a closing message to the forum and pick up the process where it began the ad hoc collaboration.

This ability is apparently popular with IT managers. "SharePoint is really big pain for them," said Smith. "Those sites are popping up right and left. The IT groups don't know how to support them or keep track of them."

Collaboration in BPM

Collaboration is a key theme in Lombardi's latest set of product announcements -- the ability for people to work with each other in the organization whether they're part of IT, business or process management; to tap the knowledge of users and share it; to set up on-the-fly chats and portals for communication.

Yet collaboration is a messy business. Often it works best when it's freeform. By introducing the notion of encapsulating these looser aspects of a process into a structured context, Lombardi has succeeded in retooling its software to work closer to the way people really do.

Useful Links

Lombardi Software
http://www.lombardisoftware.com/

Lombardi Teamworks 6 information
http://www.lombardisoftware.com/enterprise-bpm-software.php

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