We’ve all been there. With piles of work to be done, we maintain manual check-lists, spreadsheets, tracking calendar and so on. Soon, maintaining those calendars becomes another task. We want to focus on work at hand. And we wish there was an app for everything we do. So we go out and look for that App. We try a product or two with the time that we steal from real work, make some compromises on what we really need, and buy an Off-the-Shelf solution. Now, an off-the-shelf solution is just that – a ready-made solution to the most common problems that everyone faces. Fair enough, “my exceptional needs are not as common as to warrant being addressed by a product vendor” – we console ourselves and deal with it. And now someone comes and tells us we can build our own business process the way we want. Are you nuts? One of the reasons we went out there and bought the off-the-shelf product is that we don’t want to bang our heads with technical stuff. We’re up to our necks with stuff we can’t get done on the business front, there’s definitely no leeway to bang our heads on technicalities and maintenance. No, seriously, every time we tried doing any tech stuff, we found ourselves under a bigger pile of technical errors, administration issues and a mess that we didn’t have in the first place. And we can’t hire (more) technical staff. And now you come and say that we can build our own business processes?
Yes, we do. And, there are reasons that we feel that you can do it. Rather, we feel that you are in the best position to do that – build your own business process – for at least some of your processes. Really. Here’s why we think so. You know your business process best. If you could really build your workflows the way want, without the technological bottlenecks blocking you, you are the best person to create it quickly. You will know what you want and how you want it. You will know where to focus on initially. You will know what are truly business exceptions and which exceptions are really not so critical to spend so much time building into the solution.
You will know where to start from, and which paths should get added as and when we proceed, so long as you can do that quickly too. You can do it if you don’t need a business-technology translation to get it done.
One of the biggest challenges, as process owners and business heads know the hard way, is that making someone do what you want is tougher than doing it yourself wherever possible. Technical implementers most often are unaware of the business functionality, and communicating with them can be a lot of effort to get it right. If the technical translation of everything that you need is not needed, it should sound relatively doable. If you are using the same business lingo to define the process that you use in business, there’s no translation. You can do it if there are no plumbing and admin overheads. It is an obvious issue, if software needs to be installed and maintained on your hardware. The overheads just do not justify some simple inexpensive solutions for getting some of the mundane tasks done. If the solution is available over a browser, any technical maintenance is not your headache. …And, if you’re guided through a wizard, without a technical prerequisite. If you could use Gmail or any other business productivity software, then it should be encouraging to know that a wizard-driven process creation on kissflow is not even as hard. Most of our customers have been able to build their first processes very quickly, and we have thousands of them! We might sound nuts to suggest you build your own business process. But that was the idea & premise on which we even built Kissflow Process – to enable you to do just that! Worth trying at least?
