Complete Accountability and Transparency For Every Process

What is the idea?

The Challenge: At the core of accountability and transparency is visibility into the status, information, and processes of each program. 

Unfortunately, most processes in place today are manual—this not only means poor visibility but manual reporting which leaves room for error. Plus, means of automating theses processes are too expensive and take too long to implement to satisfy the timeframe of Recovery Act guidelines.  This is not an option when speed is an important factor.

The Solution: Lean Business Process Management (BPM) offers a swift and pragmatic approach to process management. Lean BPM solutions make is simple to design and deploy collaborative applications quickly—these applications automate processes, capture critical data at every step, and provide full transparency across a process.

Additionally, Lean BPM solutions are built for non-coders, people like Business Analysts, so they can quickly make changes to their collaborative applications (without involving technical resources) as guidelines continue to evolve.
 
See An Example: Here’s an example of a Lean BPM application powered by Serena Business Mashups. It’s an application that manages the process for ARRA Project Submission, Review, and Approval. In true lean fashion, it was built in just hours, and deployed in minutes. You can check it out on Serena’s site at www.serena.com/go/arra.

Why is it important?

Manual processes make full traceability and accountability a nearly impossible goal. What’s more is that traditional systems for automating processes are expensive, cumbersome, and require costly technical resources.

Lean BPM solutions offer an alternative. With Lean BPM you design and deploy your own collaborative applications without coding skills. These applications bring speed to your organization with streamlined processes and have detailed audit logs built right in.

Agency Example: U.S. Office of Personnel Management
Over the last five years, OPM has been leveraging a Lean BPM solution powered by Serena Business Mashups. The collaborative applications OPM deployed manage the communication, collaboration and enforcement of its standard processes, such as legal reviews, purchase requests and employee on-boarding. In that timeframe, their Lean BPM solution has been instrumental in developing roughly 80 process solutions in the areas of health benefits, background checks, FOIA requests, OMB Circular A123 compliance, processes for federal acquisitions and IT defect and enhancement management.

Currently 60% of OPM employees use these collaborative applications and that is expected to grow to 100% in the next two years.

Many of the processes that typically took over a year to deploy in prior systems are now being deployed in less than two months. Before using their Lean BPM solution, managing processes was highly labor intensive and inefficient, and managers had very little visibility into whether projects were proceeding in a timely manner, or if resources were allocated strategically.

Now, with Serena’s Lean BPM solution, managers know where projects and processes stand and quickly identify and clear bottlenecks. Because workflow is automated and tracked, employees and teams are fully accountable for the work they perform and cannot bypass standard procedures.

Thanks to reminders, escalations and other notifications, employees know exactly what’s expected of them and when they’ve received ownership.

Automated processes built with Serena's Lean BPM tool are also helping OPM better manage Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act requests. The agency processes 20,000 of these requests per year and must report on the results to the Department of Justice and on its own Web site.  Using Serena to develop a process to do that was far less expensive for OPM than an available commercial off-the-shelf product.

There are a host of agencies and departments streamlining processes with Serena’s Lean BPM solution. If you'd like to learn more, feel free to contact me.

Note:  This submission was provided by Serena Software, Inc. Serena Software was recently selected to participate in the "Six Strategies to Survive the Stimulus" event on April 29th at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Additionally, Serena participated in the panel discussions along with GAO, OPM, and DOT.