Daniel Rayner ADT podcast cover
Episode: 41

Daniel Rayner - Process Pioneers & Business Process Management (BPM)

Posted on: 14 Oct 2021
Daniel Rayner ADT podcast cover

Daniel Rayner is the managing director of GBTEC APAC and host of Process Pioneers, a podcast focused on business process management (BPM).

In this episode, we take a deep dive into the topic of business process management and its connection to agility and digital transformation. We also explore the impact of Covid on the adoption and perspective of BPM. We close with Daniel's top five takeaways from the Process Pioneers podcast and tips for business owners on successfully implementing BPM.

 

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Transcript

“We've got a lot of organizations that realize that we've got to understand what we're doing and we need to understand what our new normal is going to be. How are we going to deliver value moving forward? I think for some organizations, Covid has actually forced them into a place where they are actually thriving because they've been forced to think outside the box.” 

Intro:
Welcome to the Agile Digital Transformation Podcast, where we explore different aspects of digital transformation and digital experience with your host, Tim Butara, content and community manager at Agiledrop. 

Tim Butara: Hello, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Our guest today is Daniel Rayner, the managing director of GBTEC Asia Pacific, and also the host of the Process Pioneers podcast where he talks about business process management. In today's episode, he's going to tell us more about Business Process Management or BPM and also share some of his most interesting takeaways from his podcast. Welcome, Daniel. Thanks for joining me on today's episode. Can we start off by you telling us a few words about the Process Pioneers podcast and how you started it? 

Daniel Rayner: Fantastic. Thanks for having me, Tim. I really appreciate the opportunity to be part of Agile Digital Transformation. I was listening to an episode of yours yesterday and just the caliber of people that you get on the show, I've certainly been learning a lot from them, so I hope I've got something valuable to share with your audience today. 

So Process Pioneers, that's the podcast I started going back just over a year now. It was around, I think it was June 2020 when I released the first episode. And really the podcast series is I'm talking with various BPM practitioners, specialists, those that have adopted a business process management approach in their organization. 

And the way it came about was, as Tim mentioned, I am part of GBTEC Asia Pacific. I'm helping GBTEC expand to the Asia Pacific region, and that was mid 2019 when I took on this role. And I probably spent about a good three to six months talking with different people from different organizations here trying to understand, how are you managing your business processes? 

Because for anyone that's trying to deliver value to their customers, you've got to understand, well, what is their appetite for the product or the service that I'm offering? And I'm offering a solution that helps you manage your business processes. So of course, I've got to understand, why would anybody want to purchase a software like GBTEC is the manufacturer of? 

And so it was through these conversations, I was getting a good understanding of how organizations were managing their business processes, in particular in the Australia and New Zealand region. And I found that there were three categories that I could basically put the people into. 

First category was, they weren't managing their business processes at all. They had no idea what their processes were, how they were delivering value. The middle category was, maybe they had tried adopting the BPM approach. But for whatever reason, it never really took off. They never really gained momentum with it. And then the last category was those people that had adopted business process management had seen or found a significant value in this management approach, and it was delivering significant value to the organization. 

And it was in talking to that third group, this third category, where as I was talking to these people that had found significant value in BPM, I was thinking of all of these other people that had conversations with, that I was thinking, like, oh, this person needs to talk with this person because this person has a lot for this person to learn from. And that's when I realized, well, that might be a bit tricky trying to connect the whole world together. 

So why don't I create a podcast series where I can give a platform to these BPM professionals or specialists, allow them, give them 30, 45 minutes to share their knowledge and expertise, and then be able to distribute it on all the broadcast channels, including we also do video with it, so YouTube as well, and I released it on LinkedIn so that people can learn from those that are further down the BPM journey than them. 

And that's basically where the idea came from. So it took me about three to six months after having the idea to finally see it come to life. And since then, I think I've recorded episode number 96 or number 97 just yesterday, which was with yourself, Tim. And so we're almost up to 100. And, you know, it's been a very interesting and educational journey for myself. Certainly been learning a lot through the series. And now that we're coming up to episode 100, I'm really trying to think, okay, what do we need to do to take this podcast series to the next level? 

How can we change things up a little bit to make it more interesting and more engaging? Because ultimately, that's what we want to do is we want to help organizations adopt BPM and implement it well, so yeah, I've got a few ideas that I'm sort of pondering at the moment, but, yeah, that's really the podcast series and how it came about. 

Tim Butara: That sounds super cool and a truly awesome mission of your podcast. But maybe let's take a step back. And for those listeners who are maybe in that first camp, that you mentioned, of people who don't even know about BPM and have no idea about how it could benefit their business. So can you explain, can you give us a brief explanation and maybe of BPM and what it really means for a business? 

Daniel Rayner: Yeah. Absolutely. So I would say that every organization, regardless of the industry that you're in, you are delivering some sort of value to customers, whether you're in the utility space and you're delivering that service, whether you are a software company and you're delivering software, whether you are a supermarket or a food chain of some description. You are delivering some sort of value to customers. 

And everything that we do can be broken down into a sequence of tasks or activities. And it's not just within our organizations. Everything we do, we're following a set of tasks or activities. So when I woke up this morning, I followed a process. I hopped up, first, what I do in the morning is, I grab the clothes I need, then I grab my towel. Normally, I'm waking up well before my wife is, so I shower in the spare bathroom, not in en-suite, just so I don't wake up my wife, but I'm following the same process. I grab my clothes, I grab my towel. I go through to the spare bathroom. I put my things on the ground. I have my shower, I dry myself. 

Everything that we do when you're making a meal and you follow a recipe, you're following a sequence of activities. If you're making spaghetti bolognese, you're cutting the onions, you're cutting the garlic, you're cooking that first, and you're throwing the mince in. You're cooking the mince. So everything we do, we follow a sequence of activities and tasks. And what business process management is. It's a management approach that looks at these sequence of tasks and activities, and we try to figure out, how can we optimize this sequence of activities or how can we optimize this process? 

And for small organizations, you're not going to have, maybe it's necessarily a BPM manager. It's certainly not maybe one of the first role that you employ. But when you start looking, even though small organizations do follow a process as well, but more, it's more relevant when your organization is getting to a size where maybe you've got 500 plus employees. Maybe you're a bank and you've got 50,000, 100,000 employees. Automobile manufacturers, I know that's huge in Germany, and you might have 300,000 employees. 

But with so many people doing so many tasks, so many activities, how can you possibly understand and know whether they are working as efficiently as possible? How do you know that you don't have multiple people doing duplicate work, doing the same work as someone else? 

Also, what if someone tomorrow, they've been working at your organization for 20, 30, 40 years. All of a sudden, a number of things could happen. They could find a better job somewhere else. And all of a sudden, you've got 40 years of knowledge and information and processes walking out your door, walking out the organization door to go somewhere else. How can you possibly keep delivering value at the same efficiency when that person that has been doing it for so long walks out and leaves the organization? That they could get hit by a bus tomorrow, they could win the gold Lotto and choose to resign from work. 

Whatever reason it is, our memories are a poor form of storage, and so we need to get the tasks and the activities that maybe for your process participants, as I call them, maybe they naturally know how to do the work that they're doing every day. But how are you going to onboard that next person? And so there are many different benefits and parts of BPM that's very valuable. And we'll probably touch on more as our conversation goes on. But yeah, it's really managing those business processes to make sure your business is running as optimally as possible. 

Tim Butara: Okay. You mentioned that obviously this is kind of a bigger problem, or the benefits of implementing BPM are much greater for larger organizations compared to smaller organizations. But also, on the other hand, there's a higher chance of a person with very unique expertise being at a small company. So maybe in light of this, is BPM the right way for any type, any size of company, or are there specific types, sizes of companies where BPM is a particularly great fit? 

Daniel Rayner: I guess from my experience, what I've noticed is that when that organization starts getting to a size where it becomes harder to manage what everybody is doing on a day to day basis, that's when BPM is almost necessary. Not that it's not valuable up until then. I mean, I think as I said at the start, whatever business you're in, whether you're in a large bank that has 100,000 employees or whether you're in a startup company with two people and you're delivering value to your customer, everyone's following a process. 

But for the I guess the smaller size company, for the startup companies. And we'll probably-- I know you've got a question around like Agile and BPM and how they complement one another. But I think for startup companies, they have the flexibility to be more agile, to make quicker, faster changes, because they don't have a team of 50 or 100 or 500 to communicate to. It's a very small team. They're probably sitting in the same room talking to one another. They can make these iterative incremental changes and be quite quick to test their ideas, to test their processes in the marketplace and then quickly change them. 

And I think what we've noticed over the last 10, 15, 20 years is startup companies that have entered into entire new markets or not new markets, but entered into existing, established markets, but have delivered value in an entirely new way. And I can rattle off a number of those companies, but there are so many of them, but probably the biggest ones we're aware of is, companies like Facebook. Facebook could be one where traditionally, how did we communicate and get our news of the day and understand what's going on in the world? Well, we picked up a paper newspaper. 

Facebook came along and not only connected the whole world, but I can't remember the last time I picked up a newspaper or even watched the news to understand what's going on in the world, because I'm jumping on Facebook and Facebook is giving me everything I need. We've got your Airbnbs, you've got the Ubers, you've got even platforms like Canva, which is a software that came out of Australia here as a competitor to Photoshop and Photoshop, every graphic designer would know Photoshop from the Adobe suite, and how powerful that is, Canva’s just come along and really disrupted the entire market because it's giving a better, more intuitive user experience for doing all these all of your graphic design work. I mean, I use Canva, and I'm not even a graphic design artist, so it's that easy to use. 

So I think we're seeing startup companies that aren't stuck to their rigid, ancient, traditional processes that are coming into new markets with a new perspective that aren't aren't from that market. But they're coming in. And we've seen that in the whole financial services space as well, the amount of digital banks that are popping up everywhere, because we've got people entering into this space that are like, hey, I think we can deliver this financial service in a better way. 

And so I think I think that's when it puts pressure on large organizations to be like, well, we're getting disrupted. We're getting disrupted by these smaller, more agile organizations. We need to understand what we're doing, that's your processes. We need to understand what our starting point is, what our baseline is. So understanding your existing processes. And we don't need to understand, what are we gonna do to create the future? What are we gonna do to innovate? What are we gonna do to continue to deliver value and to make sure that we don't get disrupted by all of these challenging challenges in the marketplace? 

And I think it all comes back to understanding, where are you at right now? Because if you're in a company of 100,000, if you want to implement huge changes to the way that you deliver value, you've got to communicate that somehow. And then when you've implemented all of these process changes, you've got to analyze that to understand, is this actually delivering the value that we want it to deliver? 

Because with a startup company, they can trial, they can go through a series of quick iterations where they're trialing something, they're measuring it. They're making changes, trial and error, trial and error, trial and error. But for large organizations, that trial and error process, how are you going to get all of those new processes out to the 100,000 people that are doing the work? 

And so, I mean, most of my time is spent discussing this with larger organizations. But I think I think small organizations will benefit greatly from understanding their business processes, especially if they've got ambitions to grow from a 50 person company to a 500 person company to a 5000 person company. The sooner you've got your processes down and you can analyze them. I think it's just going to be better in the long run anyways. 

Tim Butara: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So with all this in mind, would you say that Agility and BPM go well together? Should businesses that want to implement BPM also be looking at agile strategies or vice versa? You know, how do these two play together? 

Daniel Rayner: Yeah, it's a good question, because I think depending on who you talk to, depending on which camp they sit in, I have found that sometimes there are agile practitioners that will look at their whole BPM space and they won't adopt BPM because they're doing agile. “We're doing an agile thing. It's different to BPM. We don't need BPM or for BPM practitioners. This is a BPM thing we're not going to focus on, we're not going to do the whole agile thing.” 

And so I think that's very interesting because from my perspective, they are very complementary to one another. I think from the agile camp, BPM can look like it seems slower. It seems like there's a lot of governance. There's a lot of structure around it. Doesn't that slow things down? But I think if BPM is done well, it doesn't have to be slow. If you're doing BPM with an agile mindset, I think it can be very powerful because I think having governances in place is only going to be beneficial in the long term. So who actually actually owns that process, who takes responsibility for that work that's getting done. 

If that process, those set of tasks or activities are performing poorly, who's actually responsible for that poor performance? And if they are performing really well, then who is responsible for it doing really well? Because we want to take that person and we want to see how they can transform other areas of the organization. So you need this governance around your business processes, who's responsible for it, who's signing off on it, who's approving it to be released to the process participants or process performance for them to carry out the work. 

And in fostering this agile culture, I guess you could say that's equally as important, because you don't want to document a business process as it is, and then park that process to the side, make no changes to it, you don't improve it, you're not really analyzing it. If you're not measuring it, how can you manage it? 

And so you need to foster this culture where people feel like they can bring-- the process participants, the people at the coal face, so to speak, they feel like they can bring their solutions to the table, because if it's a call center, these are the people on the phone talking to the customers. They are in the best position to understand, well, what are some pain points and problems in this process? What are some problems I'm recognizing from the customers perspective, and what do we need to do? How can we make these iterative changes, these incremental changes to offer a better service, to deliver value quicker, to deliver more value and deliver quicker value to the customer? 

And so yeah, I think they work hand in hand. But from I guess whatever camp you've started off in, you're probably not gonna have the understanding or as much understanding of the other camp. For me personally, I'm very much coming from the BPM camp. I definitely have a lot more experience from the BPM sort of angle. And when I see, when I hear about organizations that have adopted that agile approach, and they haven't implemented BPM, and they're not actually managing their processes in some sense or another in some form or another, I kind of wonder, like, how are you exporting that throughout the organization? 

You're making these quick changes, but how you're analyzing it, how you're measuring it, how you're feeding it back to the key team or the process owner, like all of these different things. But then equally, I've seen BPM get adopted, and there wasn't a clear why or purpose or driver behind the work they were doing. And so they end up with piles of process documentation, they don't get looked at after they've been documented. Just it could be a six month, twelve month, two year piece of work that doesn't actually get used. It doesn't actually deliver value to the organization. That's not good either. So I think there is a good match or pairing between the two. 

Tim Butara: Yeah. I definitely agree. I think you've demonstrated this really well. It's like businesses who are more reluctant to go full in on agile but still want to optimize processes,  maybe will start more from a BPM standpoint, and then if they want to optimize their implementation of BPM, then they'll turn to more agile strategies. Whereas even those businesses, as you said, the startups with two people, maybe the benefits of BPM will not be as significant. But implementing some elements of BPM will be much, much easier at that stage of the company. And then later on, the benefits might become much more significant. So it still pays off to do it. Nice. Nice. 

What about digital transformation? How does BPM factor into all this? Especially, I would assume that all of these things, all of these process improvements have been on the rise in their adoption in the past year and a half. 

Daniel Rayner: Yeah. Absolutely. Definitely. Over the last 18 months, we've seen a big increase in organizations wanting to understand, what do we actually do? In the podcast series Process Pioneers, as I said, I've had many conversations with different people in different levels of an organization, and one in particular comes to mind where there was a CEO of a large telecommunications company here in Australia, and they had a very process centric way of managing their organization. And if anybody came to them with a problem and as you could imagine, as the CEO, problems would be thrown at him every single hour of every day, the first question he would respond with would be, what is the process? 

And he paused. And he’d wait. And he'd wait to see whether the person presenting this problem, whether they understood what the process was, what the sequence of activities was. And if this person couldn't articulate what happened throughout that process, the different steps necessary, then the CEO would tell them, go away, understand what the process is. Once you've understood exactly what's going on, come back to me. And then we've got a baseline. We've got a starting level. We've got a starting point that we can work with, because how do we know-- you can set a target, but how do you know what you need to change to reach that target if you don't really know what you're starting with or what you're working with. 

And so that was an example of, I guess, when BPM is adopted and driven from a top-down approach where the CEO really embedded it into the organization. And so I think for an organization that has adopted BPM well, they do have that clarity and that transparency around what's going on. How are our processors performing, which are our poor performances? Where are the bottlenecks in our processes? Where are the long idle times? Which processes are hurting the most? And therefore, what do we need to do to fill that gap? 

And then we've got technology coming out, has been out for a while now, particularly process mining. I mean, there's many different technologies when it comes to business process management. But process mining will actually take the data from your existing systems, and it will reengineer the processes using this data. So it takes time codes. It takes the case IDs, the case numbers. It takes the activity names. It takes all of this information from your ERP system or your CRM system or any system that you're entering data into. 

It'll take all of that data. It'll reengineer your process and show you, this is actually what's going on in the process. And this is where all the bottlenecks are. This is where all the long idle times are. This is where the weakest areas of your processes are, and not only that, but it can simulate, well, what if we change some resources around? Instead of having so many resources over here, what if we take some of those resources, put them into this part of the process? Does that free up the bottleneck? And if it frees up the bottleneck, what does that actually mean for the entire end to end process? 

And so there's a technology that allows you to make these changes without actually making these changes. So you can actually use this data to hypothesize, well, what is possible and what is the optimum outcome? And I think also using process mining is quite an eye opener for a lot of organizations. There's another example where a hospital used process mining to understand one of the journeys that a patient would go on. 

And I think it took a data set of about 1500 cases. So 1500 patients that went through what the hospital thought was the one process or the one sequence of activities. But when they used process mining, they actually found that these 1500 cases, there were 800 different variations of the same process. 

So as a hospital, they think that the customer journey is very straightforward. Oh, yeah. We've got all these customers. They're just going through the same sequence of activities. But no, there was 800 different ways these patients were navigating the same process, whether they were going back to the administration people, and then they were getting referred onto this other person in the same hospital, and then they were getting sent over here. Whatever it might be, it actually wasn't a simple and straightforward process. 

But the hospital would have had no idea how complex the process was until they had looked at their existing data and looked at actually, what's going on? Because it's one thing to get all of your key stakeholders in a room and to have a conversation about what, do you think the process is? What do you think-- we're doing a job, what do you think all the tasks and activities are? 

It's one thing to discuss it, to debate it and to hypothesize like, oh, yeah. This is what the process is. Then someone across the other side of the room says, oh, actually, that's not quite right. This is what happens. And then someone else says, oh, that's not right either. It’s actually more like this. It's one thing to do that; it's another thing to use data from your existing systems. And there's no debating that. That is exactly what's going on if you've got the quality of data there. 

So I think there are many and that's just one small example of managing your business processes. But I think there are many examples and case studies out there from organizations and how BPM is part of the digital transformation lifecycle or part of the digital transformation journey, digitizing what you're doing as a workforce so that you can analyze it, you can optimize it, you can export that across the organization. And ultimately, it's all about delivering value to the organization and helping the organization to meet its strategic objectives. 

Tim Butara: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Some great examples here again. And I assume that since a large part of BPM is using digital to optimize these processes, I would assume that BPM adoption has gone up in the past 18 months, that BPM, innovation and adoption in the BPM space have kind of accelerated because of Covid and with Covid. 

Daniel Rayner: Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. I think we see organizations that have-- 18 months ago were panicking because they realized that their supply chain that had been in place for the last 5, 10, 15, 20 years had to change because Covid forced the change, basically. And so we've got a lot of organizations that realize, we've got to understand what we're doing and we need to understand what our new normal is going to be. How are we going to deliver value moving forward? I think for some organizations, Covid has actually forced them into a place where they are actually thriving because they've been forced to think outside the box. 

How can we deliver value in a way that we've never considered before? And we've got some organizations that are really thriving in the current environment. Equally, we've got a lot of organizations that are struggling because maybe they didn't have their processes documented. They didn't actually have it documented down what the process is. How do we deliver value? And so what do we need to change? 

How do we know we need to change that part? And how do we know that we're spending our time on the most important areas of the process? Or are we just doing work for work’s sake or making changes, making improvements for the sake of making improvements without actually knowing whether we're focused on the most critical areas of the organization? 

So I've certainly seen an increase in BPM adoption. But I think, you know, there's a lot of moving parts when it comes to BPM. It's not just about technology. It's not just about the software. There are a lot of things to get put in place. You need that sponsorship, that buy-in from the senior leadership level. You need process ownership and governance. So how are you going to have people that will take responsibility for the processes? You need to have a culture of continuous improvement that you've got as many people as possible looking for changes, looking for improvements, offering solutions, offering ideas and acting those out. 

Yeah. So there's a lot of different moving parts there. So I think some organizations will adopt a version of BPM, and it's certainly in some cases, it hasn't gone well. They've done it for 6, 12 months, but they haven't implemented it well. And so depending on who you talk to, you'll probably get a different experience or understanding of what BPM is and what BPM can do. 

Tim Butara: Okay. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Maybe as a final question, we focused now mostly on business process management. But we haven't really talked about Process Pioneers, your podcast, only in the beginning. So maybe in the final section of this episode, can you share your top takeaways from the conversations you've had for Process Pioneers? 

Daniel Rayner: Yeah. Absolutely. So I think there are probably five key takeaways from the series that have stood out to me. I would say the first one is you can start small. And I would encourage people to start on a small scale. So I just was talking about then getting adoption and buy-in from senior leadership. That's amazing. And that's great. Especially. And we've worked with organizations where they'll set up a process center of excellence. They will adopt a suite of technology. They will put their process ownership in place. They'll do everything with the full sponsorship, the full momentum, the full buy-in from the senior leadership behind them. And that can work really well at ramping it up quickly. 

But if you're listening to this right now and maybe you're saying, but we don't have that buy-in, we don't have that sponsorship from the senior leadership, I've recognized that we need to understand and manage our business process. If this is what you're thinking, then you can start small. And I have heard many case studies where, you know, they didn't have that buy-in and sponsorship from senior leadership. 

So what they did was they firstly, they had conversations with people in their team, in their business unit, in their department. They tried to find people that resonated with this management approach, that resonated with the idea that everything we do follows a sequence of activities or a sequence of tasks. They tried to find these other what I would call process champions. So people that are going to really champion this process approach, find these people, talk to them, bounce ideas often, and then see how you can implement some process management or process improvement techniques in the work that you're already doing. 

And I've heard many case studies. One in particular comes to mind where there was this person, that exactly as I was just saying, they didn't get that senior leadership buy-in, they found similar people with a similar like mindedness when it comes to process, they adopted a few process management practices, whether they were mapping out their processes, providing governance for the process, of having KPIs around the process in their project, in the project they were working on. 

And that project did so well, that all of a sudden they had other teams noticing what they were doing and the value that was being created. Other teams came to them being like, oh, why did your project go so well? And they said, well, it's because we adopted this process management approach where we actually understood what we were doing. And then we could make these incremental improvements, knowing that we were spending our time in the best place. 

And all of a sudden, other teams were adopting this process-centric approach. And then before they know it, the department took notice and recognized, wow, like, this is working so well on all of these projects. We need to adopt this process centered approach as a department. And then as the department adopted that business process management approach, before too long for the entire senior leadership recognized, hey, why is this department all of a sudden performing so well? We need to adopt the approach that they're taking, we need to adopt this enterprise wide across the entire organization. So if you don't have that buy in or that sponsorship, don't worry, start small and you can work your way up from there. 

And I just realized that I've got five to go through. So I'll try not to take as long as I just did on that one. But I think the next one is kind of, links with the first one is executive buy-in. So if there is someone in your senior leadership team who maybe you look up on their LinkedIn profile or you look on their Zing profile, which is the German social media I've been told or whatever social media. But try and find their professional profile on LinkedIn, understand what is their background. 

And if you find a senior leader that comes from an organization where they were involved in process management, start with them when you're trying to get that executive buy-in, start with them, because from their previous experience, they should have an understanding and an idea of the value it brings. Unless it was performed poorly, then they might have some resistance towards it. But getting that executive buy-in is good. 

Next one would be continuous improvement. So don't just document your processes for documentation's sake. Even though I have heard many case studies where an organization has documented their processes, and just by having that transparency without even improving a process, they've looked at this documentation and they've recognized, hang on a second. Why do we have three people doing exactly the same task? That needs to be just performed by one person. 

And they're already like freeing up resources. They're already finding significant value just through documentation. But I would say, have a greater purpose behind what you're doing, have a greater why are we documenting this stuff? Why are we managing our business processes and have a, foster an appetite to continually improve. How can we do this better? How can you leverage your team so that it's not just the process improvement team, but the process improvement team is empowering the process participants to come up with ideas and suggestions and things like that. So continuous improvement. 

What's another one? I've had them written down. I probably should have got this document up before I jumped into this conversation. I will just quickly have a look because I've got two more, continuous improvement, executive buy-in, starting small. Yeah, those are three of the key ones, at least. And if I can think of the other two, I'll throw them in there. But yeah, that's what I would say. 

Tim Butara: Okay. Yeah. Those are definitely some key points. And they were points that we kind of mentioned several times throughout the episode. So it shows that even if we didn't have this final question, these would be the obvious takeaways kind of incremental adoption, executive buy-in. And obviously the mindset of continuous improvement is key, because that's why you're doing BPM in the first place, probably, right? 

Daniel Rayner: Yeah, that's right. That's right. And I think depending on who the organization is, you're going to be starting off at a different what we call process maturity level. So you've got to understand, like, out of all of these core factors, or fundamentals or foundations, what do we have? Do we have, can we easily get buy-in from senior leadership? Can we foster this continuous improvement culture? Has it already been adopted internally and we just need to sort of shape it around process like process management and process work? And who are we going to give responsibility to? 

Another one that I'm just quickly looking it up here, and I have mentioned it before, but the other two is, everyone is important. So as an individual or as a process team, you simply, there are only very few hours in the day. You need to learn how to leverage people to draw out of them their pain points, problems, challenges and solutions along with those, which I have mentioned a couple of times. So that's another one. Everyone is important. 

Don't bottle neck process management by everything having to go through you and being like everything has to be created by you and your team, leverage the people, and then the last one is start with why. And I mentioned that before as well. But you've got to have a clear understanding of, why are we doing this? What is our ideal outcome? What are we hoping to achieve? And you always come back to that. And then it's easier to have the conversations with different people when you've got a clear defined why. 

Tim Butara: Well, thanks so much, Daniel, for all the awesome tips and sharing your experience from the podcast, your takeaways. This has been a great conversation. I hope our listeners also got some important takeaways and some value from it. 

Daniel Rayner: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on the show, Tim. It's been an absolute pleasure, and I hope everyone's been able to take something away through our conversation today. 

Tim Butara: Yeah. Maybe in this line, if anybody would want to learn more about you, more about business process management, where would you point them to? 

Daniel Rayner: So I guess the obvious one would be the Process Pioneers podcast series. Like Tim asks all of his guests a sequence of questions. I'm also getting BPM practitioners and professionals on the podcast series and asking them questions and really trying to dive deep into what BPM looks like for them. I've also had Tim on the show as well. We've recently recorded that episode and talking about agile and how agile and BPM can complement one another. 

So I'd say that's a good starting point because being able to learn from those that are actually putting this into practice is good and ideal. I'm also on LinkedIn as well, and I'm often sharing a lot of BPM-related things as well, so feel free to jump on and connect with me on LinkedIn. 

We've got a big event coming up next week called Process Days, where we've got a line up of panelists and speakers where it's all about talking about business process management. So if it doesn't work out because it's too last minute, follow me anyways, connect with me on LinkedIn and as we have events coming up in the future, go along to these events and again learn from those that are putting BPM into practice, day in and day out. 

Tim Butara: Awesome, thanks. Well, to our listeners, that's all for this episode. Have a great day, everyone and stay safe. 

Outro: 
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