Workflow Consulting Services: Helping Your Automated Workflow Project to Succeed the First Time

By Suzanne Watson and Molly Spangler, Systems Analysts, Optical Image Technology, Inc.

[Note: This paper is targeted to business and IT managers who are on the threshold of implementing an automated workflow project. The goal is not to explain automated workflow, but rather to inform readers about the types of services that may be needed for a workflow integration project. The intent is to help the reader evaluate whether outside services will accelerate or add value to the workflow implementation.]

An automated workflow project is only as good as the vision and design behind it. The best designs are worth naught if the vision is poor or incomplete, and the clearest goals will not be achieved if the technical “blueprint” for the project is flawed. Homeowners envision changes that will enhance their dwelling and generate long-term value from their investment, and they often rely on outside expertise to ensure that changes are made professionally and on schedule. Similarly, highly skilled workflow consultants can help you explore your business goals in depth and generate the designs you need to bring these dreams to fruition.

Workflow consulting services: how to determine if you need them

Companies in multiple industries have demonstrated the power of workflow as part of effective business process management. Automated workflow helps organizations to dramatically increase efficiency and enhance customer service, from claims and loan processing through collegiate or patient admissions. Workflow consultants (or system analysts) offer specialized services that can help you reach your goals, and your workflow vendor should be one of your first and best resources for workflow consulting.

Ideally, you will have selected a vendor with a strong workflow product and the company chosen will have staff that is both experienced in, and knowledgeable about, how to integrate workflow with your critical line-of-business applications. A vendor’s knowledge of their product’s capabilities, when combined with real-world experience in workflow design and integration, enables them to help your organization maximize the business Automated workflow helps organizations to dramatically increase efficiency and enhance customer service, from claims and loan processing through collegiate or patient admissions. Workflow consultants (or system analysts) offer specialized services that can help you reach your goals. � page / ph: 814.238.0038 value of the product and take advantage of the flexible and wide-ranging tools. To decide if you need such services, ask yourself the following:

Have you already conducted a thorough study of your business processes, streamlining them and making them consistent? If you have, are you thoroughly convinced that your new procedures are exactly what you want to automate?
Has your organization implemented automated workflow and integrated it with line-of-business applications in other areas within the company, or is this the first time?
If you previously implemented automated workflow elsewhere successfully, can you tap into the internal expert that led the initiative, and learn from his or her successes and failures?
If this is the first time, do you have highly skilled IT staff that understand the complexities of system integration and workflow design, and who know the vendor’s product at the level of detail required to maximize use of that product?
If your IT staff needs to work with data-driven and document-driven workflows, do they know how to maximize the use of the product to plan and implement both effectively?
Do you have the IT resources internally to commit 100% of their time to the workflow implementation and integration, as well as the design review, interviews and testing with key staff, and training, in addition to their current job requirements?
Is your company flexible with regard to the project completion date? Is it acceptable for the project to be slowed by other priorities or design flaws that are discovered during the process?

If you responded to any of these questions with a negative answer, you should seriously explore your vendor’s professional services and look carefully at what their workflow consultants can offer you prior to, during, and after your workflow implementation. After all, a good contract or statement of work will clearly state what the vendor is expected to deliver, what the project is expected to achieve, when the various milestones will be met, when the work will be completed, and also the recourse in the event that unforeseen problems occur. This protects everyone, and ensures that projects stay on time, on task, and on budget.

Process requirements preceding workflow design

Standardization and streamlining of processes, a thorough business process analysis, and clear communication by key (and knowledgeable) staff within your company build the foundation for a workflow project’s success. In addition, your company’s management must communicate your department’s or organization’s goals clearly and state what they are trying to achieve by automating, or the project may be an interesting exercise in futility. Who needs to receive, approve, or take action on what documents or information, and why? Since a major component of automated workflow is the mechanization of manual processes, understanding your processes, as well as standardizing and streamlining them, should be among the first requirements.

Although a vendor may not know your company’s unique processing rules and preferences as well as your management and employees, the vendor’s workflow consultants can provide a thorough and objective business process analysis to assist you in this undertaking. It is often difficult to streamline a process that you have lived with and accepted for a long time, and this unbiased outside viewpoint can be enlightening. The vendor also needs to have access to a strong communicator on your staff who:

understands your processes in detail;
knows key information about multiple documents within your organization;
is knowledgeable about the metadata about the documents that are stored, such as the other systems the data will need to update, who is accessing the documents, etc.;
is familiar with each document type that is stored and which might require action in a workflow process;
is acquainted with the varied files, correspondence, and images that relate to each type of document;
and knows what needs to be updated periodically and/or routinely.

Your internal staff has the greatest knowledge about your organization, knows what documents and data need to move throughout the organization, and the appropriate action required for each document. The consultant complements this by providing an objective analysis that can help a company to organize and standardize weak and inconsistent practices prior to the workflow design process. The consultant can gather needed information by interviewing management and reviewing written documentation and diagrams of organizational reporting structure, with the goal of developing a blueprint that will guide you in effective process automation.

Specialized skills and relevant expertise: the core value of workflow consultants

Most of us find ourselves unable to commit 100% of our time and energies to the building or renovation of our homes; implementing and modifying a workflow project requires the same dedication, but the challenge is no different. System analysts bring not only skill, but also dedicated time to carry the implementation forward and meet your timelines. They are responsible for working with you to develop an effective statement of work or detailed contract, and are bound by it to deliver on these promises. Summarily stated, the workflow consultant or system analyst can architect your success.

Although a workflow consultant is not simultaneous with a software architect, the consultant performs a job similar to an architect in the broadest definition, translating the user’s needs into the builder’s requirements (in this case, the workflow design). The consultant’s role is to understand the customer’s goals and dreams, to reflect them in the design, and create a blueprint for success. He should ensure that training is sufficient for end users to run the system and for management to oversee it and potentially to create their own additional workflow designs. In addition, workflow consultants have the experience to be able to spot bottlenecks and other problems inherent in the plan that may lead to slow processing, or to increase processing speeds in internally designed workflows that are not running as quickly as projected. A major improvement in processing time or efficiency often easily pays for the cost in the services rendered.

The services provided by a workflow consultant will vary greatly depending upon a company’s needs and the size and sophistication of its IT staff, but they can generally be placed into six major categories for a new workflow project. These include defining the scope and infrastructure for the workflow project, business process analysis, workflow design, testing, workflow management and reporting, and training. Workflow consultants can spearhead each of these processes, or complement the skills of your existing staff, depending on your needs.

Added value service #1: Defining project scope and assessing infrastructure

Every company should be able to define the goals of the workflow project, but defining the project scope can be a challenge. From a business point of view, the scope takes the overall project vision and states what will and will not be included; it lays the boundaries for the project as a whole and within each phase. From a technical point of view, hardware and software limitations and present infrastructure will be studied so that recommendations can be made for additional hardware and software that will support the achievement of the business goals. Software integration will also be assessed to support the business objectives.

One of the greatest added value services that a workflow consultant can offer is experience integrating workflow with other applications. A workflow consultant or systems analyst should possess knowledge about the infrastructure and understand how to integrate workflow with in-house programs and third-party applications. Depending on the types of applications with which workflow will need to be integrated, the consultant may need to work closely with your IT staff or third-party vendors. Many organizations have already made a significant investment in their IT infrastructure, but the applications operate in isolation, not taking full advantage of the information stored within each of these applications and its value to other departments within the organization. When it is implemented with forethought, automated workflow is the bridge that connects these disparate silos of information and maximizes the value of corporate information to the entire organization. Make sure that your vendor has considerable experience in workflow integration so that the design for the workflow integration is thorough, the infrastructure is sufficient, and it operates smoothly.

Added value service #2: Business Process Analysis

The need for the workflow consultant to be involved in the analysis of the routine business processes can vary greatly from site to site, depending upon the efficiency of the site’s manual processes and how thoroughly they have been documented. A workflow consultant often is a key player in documenting a company’s existing processes through a series of questions and interviews, asking questions beyond the physical processes, including:

What are you trying to achieve with this business process?
Which steps in each process can be standardized?
What will be the exceptions to those processes, and how do they need to be handled?
Are there any steps in the process that can be streamlined manually to increase efficiency?
What existing assets can complement or automate the process that are currently inaccessible to the knowledge worker?

Regardless of whether you are pleased with the manual processes you have in place, need to adjust them, or recreate them completely from scratch, a workflow consultant can help you automate effectively the first time. In some cases, the head of a business unit such as claims, patient admissions, underwriting, student financial aid, or another line of business will be the leader of the project implementation internally. This person should know the company’s or department’s business processes thoroughly. He might ask the workflow consultant to interview existing staff to gain insight into the processes, or in contrast, he might choose to deny access to the staff if the processes are poor and inconsistent, and need to be completely reworked before the procedures are automated. Although it can be a painful process to ignore what is in place, it can help to create an environment that is suitable for an objective review.

Added value service #3: Workflow Design

An analysis of the business processes and integration considerations are necessary before true workflow design can begin. Assuming your business processes have been manually optimized, procedures have been standardized for consistency, and a plan is in place to handle the exception cases within the workflows (such as claims that are denied, forms that are returned, admissions applications that are incomplete, or customers requiring a personal call), you can begin working on the design for the initial workflows. In some cases, the workflows may involve only a few actions that need to be taken by a small number of people. In many cases, however, the organizational procedures that have been automated may include multiple parallel processes, involving many people and departments, and may have several possible directions that documents or data need to be sent for action.

Like the design of a home, the “blueprint” for the project needs to reflect all of the electronic “rooms” where the document or data will be temporarily housed as it awaits the next action by the person or department that has been accordingly assigned a specific responsibility within an automated workflow process. Just as a room can become too cluttered if too many items are stored within it, a company can experience unwanted bottlenecks if too much information is in an electronic queue to be processed by an individual staff member. Vendors know the features within their products that prevent such bottlenecks from occurring, and can plan proactively for success in a way that may be challenging or impossible for an IT person who does not know the intricacies of the product, no matter how skilled that person may be.

Added value service #4: Workflow Testing

Even though end users play an important role in testing the workflows that are designed, workflow consultants can often discover and efficiently address slowdowns and other concerns if they are engaged in the testing process concurrent with employee testing. Staff can easily spend hours endeavoring to analyze and understand such issues, and this can result in unnecessary processing (or even project) delays. Although the vendor’s services may carry a price tag if testing services were not contracted at the start, the vendor knows the product like the architect knows the structural design of a home, and he should be able to solve problems quickly and efficiently for a minimal fee. Since a workflow project often involves integration with multiple software applications, the supporting infrastructure can be very complex, and it has to be tested against multiple software environments thoroughly and correctly before the
Since a workflow project often involves integration with multiple software applications, the supporting infrastructure can be very complex. It has to be tested against multiple software environments thoroughly and correctly before the processes replace their manual counterparts.

Workflow integration test plans need to be created for each of the software modules involved, as well as testing for database failure and recovery. The workflows also need to be tested for ease of use, accuracy, and completeness. Another critical component of testing is making sure that the audit controls are working properly. The system may indicate that a task has been completed, but this needs to be verified during the testing process. Each action within the workflow should be tested to ensure that you are receiving correct information about the work that is being processed. Finally, the workflows need to be freshly evaluated against the goals that were originally set for the project. If your IT staff is stretched, or inexperienced with workflow, the workflow consultant may save you a lot of time, money, and headaches.

Added value service #5: Workflow Management and Reporting

Homeowners would be awash with joy if their walls could talk and tell them what is not functioning properly within the home infrastructure; the reporting tools in an automated workflow make this possible for automated business procedures if they are used properly. A workflow consultant can help you design reports that will help you to gain insight into your organization. They can help managers to compare inbound work with outbound performance, as well as analyzing productivity and performing automated inventory reporting.

A standardized process should enable a variety of staff to perform the same volume of work in comparable amounts of time. Inventory and productivity reports can be custom built to enable management to review the volume of work that is sent to each department, to assess the amount of work that is received and processed by each member of the team, and to make adjustments if they are warranted. In some cases, a member of the team may take much longer to perform tasks because that person routinely adds a step to the procedure. If the added step ensures better customer service, for example, the automated process should be reviewed for potential adjustment so that everyone performs the same service for the customers. If the step is far too costly or is not beneficial for the organization, the step should be dropped. In either case, regular reporting enables management to identify areas where there may be inconsistency or problems, and to make adjustments in the business process.

Workflow reports can be built to analyze inbound work if this is important to your organization. How many applications are coming in from a certain state? How many invoices are received from a specific vendor per month? Does the allocation of work need to be adjusted based on the types and volumes of inbound work? Metrics help managers to make informed decisions more quickly, to adjust their business processes as needed, and to remain competitive. A workflow consultant can help your organization to put the right reporting tools in place. The advice offered can help you to manage your workflows effectively and ensure that the automation of your procedures continues to provide you with information that will help your organization to improve continually.

Added value service #6: Workflow Training

Just as a new appliance in a home can be of limited value without a manual, a robust automated workflow system has less value if the end users don’t use it properly. The same is true if management is unable to tap into the valuable reporting tools that enable them to monitor staff and company productivity, or where documents and data are within each process. Although a workflow-savvy IT staff may have the technical ability to train management and staff, limited knowledge of the product’s capabilities and other priorities often make it difficult to provide the types of training that empower a company to optimize its processing, even when the best of tools are available. A vendor’s workflow consultant or system analyst should be able to offer the following types of training, depending on your needs:

End-user training, to ensure efficient and proper execution of the workflows that are put into place;
Management training, to ensure they can monitor their employees’ productivity and remain informed about the source and volumes of information entering a workflow or already within it;
Training for the appropriate IT staff to empower them to design effective workflows as the system continues to expand across the department or enterprise;
IT Consulting, to help you maintain your system, as well as design and add new workflows as your company grows.

Thorough workflow training goes well beyond showing people how to use the vendor’s system when it is in place. In many cases, companies have great visions for what they want to achieve over the long term, and they naturally want to have the independence and knowledge to build their own workflows over time. A workflow consultant can train management and staff on workflow design and execution so that the team eventually has the capability of moving forward independently and with confidence as the number of workflows increases.

Summary

Not every company needs the specialized services that are available through their vendors in order to implement workflow successfully. Some companies are large enough, and possess the technical savvy, to have an entire team that is dedicated solely to workflow design, execution, and support. If your company falls into this category, workflow consulting services may complement your skilled team, but may not be necessary.

If, however, your company falls into the much larger family of companies that does not have the luxury of providing a dedicated workflow team, take the time to investigate and seriously consider the added value that a workflow consultant can offer to your project. Together, you can design and implement a master plan that will help you achieve your business goals the first time.

To find out more about Optical Image Technology’s integrated document management and workflow software and professional services, please visit the website at www.docfinity.com, contact Optical Image Technology at 814.238.0038, or email us at info@docfinity.com.

Quick Links ...