The new JIRA on Debian Linux Reference Guide provides an improved layout. The Guide features embedded links to multimedia screencasts, which help communicate concepts better for those of us who are more visually or audibly inclined. Screencasts can also save a ton of writing and many series of screen shots. While a picture speaks a thousand words; a single screencast can speak volumes.

The new JIRA on Linux Administrators Reference Guide is still in the works. Now numbering close to a hundred pages, this Guide addresses installing, configuring and testing JIRA on a variety of Linux platforms, including Fedora and CentOS. I’ve added additional information and resources of interest to both JIRA administrators and application developers in the new Guide. The new Guide will also feature screencasts to better communicate certain topics. Look for the new Guide to be released sometime next month.

Atlassian’s technical writing team created the Doc Sprint event to enable content creators to collaborate and create reference materials in support of Atlassian products. This years’ Doc Sprint event focuses on ‘Quick Start’ and ‘How To’ Guides for Atlassian products. As one of the content creators who will be participating in the event, I’ve decided to focus on revamping my JIRA on Linux Administrators Guide (“The Guide”).

My goal for the Doc Sprint will be to revamp the last release of The Guide, into two separate new references, the JIRA on Debian Linux Admin Reference Guide, and the JIRA on Linux Admin Reference Guide. The latter of the two Guides will detail installing JIRA on application servers platforms running a variety of Linux distributions, including Fedora and CentOS.

In addition to including more screenshots and illustrations, the two new Guides will feature links to screencasts. Screencasts are a great visual aide when “seeing” is the best means of communicating a concept, idea or procedure. If you are not familiar with Screencasts, check out Don McAllister’s ScreenCastOnline.com.

I expect to post the first release of the JIRA on Debian Linux Admin Reference Guide over the coming weekend. The more comprehensive and broader JIRA on Linux Admin Reference Guide will be available by year-end. As always, your feedback and suggestions toward improving The Guides are always welcome.

Over the years however, the JIRA product has been “morphed” by the community and Atlassian to be configured to manage a broad range of workflow and business process-based applications, that have nothing at all to do with system and software development.

So why would stakeholders and managers consistently choose JIRA for business process automation projects, when there were clearly other workflow and BPM applications better suited to meet their needs?

The answer to this question is similar to the answer to the question of why Open Source solutions such as Linux, Apache, Open Office, and thousands of other system and software platforms have become the platform of choice for many commercial and nonprofit organizations.

The 3.x version of JIRA was provided in much the same manner as Open Source solutions such as Linux and Apache web server. The software was easily accessible to developers and provided free for organizations to use, without requiring organizations to incur costs associated with licensing, per-seat user and support maintenance. Competing commercial workflow and business process management applications were only offered to managers and application developers with the usual “trappings”: engagements with sales representatives, 30-day “trials”, complex licensing agreements and fees, per-user/seat costs, maintenance contracts, training and conversion fees, etc. Yuk.

Did I mention that the latest version of JIRA (v4.x) is provided to qualified nonprofit organizations for free? How about a 10-user developer’s license for the Enterprise Edition of JIRA for $10? We’re not talking “Academic” or “non-commercial use” only software editions here; we’re talking the same commercial software made available to nonprofits and developers, for free or low cost, with full technical and end-user support provided by Atlassian and the user community.

The difference between solutions like JIRA as compared to competing solutions, comes down to Atlassian enabling organizations to use JIRA v3.x to develop and deploy fully functional workflow-based applications. Competing commercial vendors rely on organizations to commit to their solution first, which involves varying levels of “pain” for stakeholders, managers and application developers alike, before granting access to fully functional software and support services. There lies the difference in the marketing strategies, and the primary reason that JIRA continues to be applied as a solution when better commercial solutions are available.

There are some BPM application vendors that have taken note of Atlassian’s JIRA marketing strategy. These companies are actively working to make it easier and more affordable for managers and application developers to access fully functional versions of their commercial products so custom “proof of concept” applications can be developed and deployed. This supports the “try before you buy” strategy, which is a much easier sell, as compared to the “jump through all of the hoops and pray that the solution truly works as advertised” approach.

Some of my favorites include ProcessMaker, a BPM platform developed by Colosa. Colosa has been hard at work over the years developing their commercial version of ProcessMaker, along with their ProcessMaker Community Edition. The ProcessMaker Community Edition Wiki has come a long way in the past year.

The wiki provides links to free ProcessMaker resources, such as documentation, tutorials, workflow libraries and the like. The ProcessMaker how-to screen casts available on YouTube are a step in the right direction, though they all need to be replaced by high-definition videos. The current screen casts I viewed were either too small to make out any detail, or too fuzzy (captured in low-definition mode) to be of any practical use to developers. I’m told that this is being addressed by Colosa, so let’s hope to see some updated ProcessMaker videos on YouTube in the near future.

Enough progress has been made this past year however, that I’ve decided to re-evaluate ProcessMaker Community Edition. The goal of my re-evaluation is to determine whether the Community Edition of ProcessMaker, along with the free documentation and support services, can enable commercial and nonprofit organizations to develop full-functional “proof-of-concept” BPM solutions for free or low-cost.

Another emerging star is BizAgi, which offers its process modeller software for free for commercial use. BizAgi has made significant investments in providing free documentation and tutorials, to support ease of adoption by both managers and application developers.

BizAgi is designed for production deployment on a Microsoft Windows platform. In digging into the detailed technical specifications, I did find indications that the Enterprise edition of BizAgi is slowly migrating to Linux-based application database and server solutions. This migration makes sense if BizAgi is targeted large enterprises, as UNIX/LINUX database and application server platforms are more prevalent as compared to MS Windows database/application server solutions.

What are your favorite free or low-cost workflow or BPM application development platforms?

There are certainly some other emerging stars in the marketplace that I have left unmentioned. Post your favorites and share you experiences; help get the word out to nonprofits, small businesses and application developers that all need free and low-cost BPM application development alternatives to expensive commercial workflow and BPM solutions.

I just released a slidecast “An Introduction to JIRA” that provides a good introduction to JIRA.  The slidecast also discusses how a variety of users benefited from using custom JIRA applications to manage and automate everyday business applications, including managing projects and documentation configuration change management.

The screencast runs about 15 minutes– have a look and let me know what you think.

Click Thumbnail for Screencast

A wise man once said that a picture speaks a thousand words. When developing a new JIRA workflow specification, a visual representation of a workflow specification can shorten the development cycle considerably and deliver other benefits that save time, energy and money.

Many managers and staff find it easier to develop a JIRA workflow specification working with a “picture” of their workflow rather than a text-based description. When developing a JIRA workflow, managers loathe having to work their way through pages of descriptive text.  A visual representation of a JIRA workflow conveys needed information more quickly, as compared to reading pages of descriptive text that describe a workflow.

JIRA workflow diagrams speed the development of a JIRA application. JIRA Application Developers can quickly develop a JIRA workflow application using a Microsoft Visio workflow specification. A JIRA specification constructed using Visio contains all of the information needed to configure a workflow using JIRA. Developers can check off workflow components (statuses, transitions etc.) right on the diagram as they develop them. Thus the diagram becomes a working visual development checklist. JIRA end-users engaged in application acceptance testing can also use a workflow diagram as a test checklist.

Visual representation of JIRA workflows are also useful for training users that are new to a JIRA. I’ve found my JIRA Visio workflow diagrams part of PowerPoint training slides. They also are on display project managers offices and taped to staff’s cubicle walls.

So how do you create a JIRA workflow diagram? If you are reverse-engineering an existing JIRA application, you can create a diagram from the table-based workflow representation provided via the JIRA Admin panel. If you have created a cross-functional diagram for the application, or have an existing cross-functional diagram of the workflow that is to be automated by JIRA, you can convert these to a JIRA workflow specification.

Once you have a cross-functional diagram of a business process, work with your JIRA application project team to identify what parts of the process flow will be managed by JIRA. Once boundaries of what JIRA is going to manage have been identified, the next step is to fire up Visio and construct a JIRA workflow specification for review by the team.

Next to the JIRA Custom Field Data Dictionary, the JIRA workflow diagram is valued most by managers and staff. If you haven’t had the opportunity to develop a JIRA application using a workflow diagram, give it a try on your next JIRA application development project. You might be surprised by all of the benefits that a picture of a workflow can deliver.

One question I’m often asked is how to begin a business process management initiative. Who should be involved in a business process or workflow management project? What methodologies and tools are available to make the task manageable for busy managers and staff? How much time will need to be invested? What will the payback be for the managers and staff involved?

One approach for a manager to get started with business process management, involves making a list of core business processes that they are accountable for managing. From this list, they pick one process that represents a significant “pain-point” for them.

Focus Process Management on Significant Organizational “Pain Points”

If there is a business process in your organization that is a significant “pain point” for management and staff, that process may be a good candidate for a business process improvement initiative. Executive sponsors will often support business process improvement initiatives that can resolve issues that are significant to stakeholders, customers and suppliers.

For example, a problem area for many organizations is the management of customer issues. I often ask managers and their staff what they do when a customer voices their concern about an issue that falls in their area of responsibility.  What exactly is the process for managing customer issues and complaints? Far too often, the answer to this question is along the lines of appeasing the customer, rather than gaining an understanding of the issue at hand. A customer issue management process should involve documenting accurately the nature of the customer’s issue. Follow-up actions should resolve the customer’s issue and address the root cause of the problem, so the issue does not affect yet another customer.

Once you have selected a business process that is a significant pain-point for the organization, assemble a small team of managers, supervisors and staff that understand how the overall process works.

Agenda for the First Business Process Team Meeting

When the team meets for the first time, the goal of the meeting is to get a dialogue going with respect to the business process of interest. Ask the team members to collaborate and construct on a white-board a cross-functional diagram that depicts the overall business process. The process diagram should identify key process steps, from the start of the process to the end of it. Departments and even people that play a significant role in the process can be reflected on the diagram. Documents and other resources can be called-out on the process diagram, as well.

This exercise can also be conducted with managers and staff that work remotely. There are several web-based tools, such as Lombardi’s Blueprint, that support group collaboration among team members that are geographically dispersed.

The goal of the first team process discovery meeting is to construct a draft visual representation of the business process of interest. You want to maintain the group’s focus on completing an overall “big picture” of how the process works (or doesn’t) from start to finish. Who is involved in the process, what information is needed at various points of the process, what work is performed at each step of the process, etc.

Deliverable for the First Team Meeting

Once the overall draft process diagram is constructed, there should be a consensus among team members that the current process diagram represents the ways that things are currently being done. A process diagram that depicts the current state of processes and workflows is often referred to as the “As-Is” diagram.

Orienting Team Members to Visual Process Mapping

Issue Management "Swimlane" Diagram

Some team members will prefer describing a business process using a text-based approach. This can result in pages of detailed descriptions that discuss policies, procedures and practices. On the other side of the spectrum, you may get a few vague paragraphs that describe how work gets done. These situations can be avoided by requiring the team use a visual diagramming approach to describe how work gets done.

Most managers and staff have learned during their college or professional career how to construct a simple flowchart diagram. Flowcharting a business process can be a good starting point for introducing team members to visual process diagramming. In fact, I’ve found with a little training and guidance, most professionals can create a cross-functional diagram (also known as a “swim lane” diagram) that adequately communicates a business process.

Microsoft’s Visio software has several templates that can be used  to create cross-functional and business workflow diagrams. Cross-functional or “swimlane” diagrams as they are sometimes called, capture who is doing what, rather than just illustrating the flow of a process from start to finish (flowchart diagram). Swimlane diagrams can also depict interaction between people, teams and departments, and the role that each plays in accomplishing the work of the process.

Some other examples of visual mapping methodologies used to visually represent a business process workflow include business process diagrams and data flow diagrams. Each of these visual methodologies provides users with a varying degree and perspective of the various aspects of a business process that is being analyzed and documented.

Why Use a Visual Approach to Process Mapping?

A visual approach to process mapping tends to capture processes and people who are often overlooked when describing a process via a narrative text-based approach. Using symbols instead of words also helps to constrain the diagramming of process at a contextual level. This is key to ensuring that the team finishes a draft “As-IS” context level business process diagram, without getting mired down by discussions of detail that are likely not relevant at this stage of the process discovery and documentation.

For these reasons and more, I encourage teams to begin their process discovery and documentation work using cross-functional diagrams. Details can be added later on, once everyone on the team has a clear picture of who is doing what.

Benefits of a Proactive Approach to Business Process Management

Once an organization is used to documenting business processes, managers and staff discover they now have a common point of reference to discuss workflow and the interaction of policies, procedures and practices. Time and energy is invested in process improvement, rather than in endless discussions on “how things work” or “should work”.Visual workflow diagrams are used as a training aids, which saves time and money as new managers and staff can be brought up-to-speed quickly.Changes that impact the organization are worked-out “on paper” first, using workflow diagrams to communicate the impact of the change to the current process. Developing solutions to a change in process via a workflow diagram can save an organization a significant amount of time, money and energy when managing change.

Key processes that are the lifeblood of the organizations are now being actively managed and measured by all involved. Documentation captures valuable intangible assets (best practices and proprietary processes) for use and reference by future generations of managers, supervisors and staff. When a key person or entire committee leaves the organization, the knowledge, expertise and know-how stay with the organization, ensuring its continued stability and growth.

Payback Begins with Process Discovery

In working on several business process and workflow management projects, I’ve often noticed that many organizations benefit just from the process of discovering exactly how they manage customer issues. “Why are we doing that? is a phase I’ve heard more times than I can count from managers when they learn how things are really being managed. Many managers are surprised to learn that what they believe to be the current issue management process differs markedly from what is actually practiced by staff during the course of daily operations.

Business Process Management is Expensive and Takes Too Much Time

If you believe the cost of investing in a proactive business process management initiative for your organization is too expensive, imagine the cost associated with reinventing processes that took years of time, manpower and money to develop and perfect. Imagine loosing the organization due to a breakdown of a critical process, or the inability to manage change effectively at a critical time. Isn’t it just good business sense to proactive manage processes that are the lifeblood of your organization?

Open Source, SaaS and PC-Based BPM Applications for Process Management Abound

There are several low-cost or free applications that can assist organizations engaged in process improvement projects. Unlike Visio, these tools are designed explicitly for process management and automation, so they offer teams features and benefits that tools like Visio cannot match.

Though Atlassian’s JIRA web application was initially developed as a workflow management solution for software development organizations, the application has evolved to the point that is can be configured to manage a broad range of business process applications, including change and issue management, resource provisioning and project/program management processes.

Another tool ideal for collaborative project teams is Lombardi Blueprint. Lombardi Blueprint is provided as Software as a Service (SaaS), so only a web browser is required to use the hosted Blueprint service. Lombardi offers a free 30-day trial of their online BPM service. After 30 days, you can still use the service, although some of the premium paid features are disabled. The price of the Blueprint service however, is well the range of what small businesses and nonprofits can easily afford.

BizAgi’s Process Modeler provides one of the best workflow modeling applications that I’ve encountered, and it is free to download, install and use. The Process Modeler is ideal for Business Analysts and those who are familiar with Business Process Modeling Notation, as BizAgi Process Modeler uses a subset of the standard Business Process Modeling (BPM) notation.

ProcessMaker, by Colosa, is a commercial Open Source web-based BPM solution. The Open Source Community Edition of ProcessMaker is maintained on Sourceforge. ProcessMaker’s user-base is worldwide, and includes large corporations, government agencies, nonprofit educational organizations and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).  The application is based on PHP and JavaScript programming and scripting languages, with Oracle’s MySQL as the database technology of choice.  ProcessMaker is supported on Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows platforms, and is also offered as a SaaS solution with application hosting provided by Colosa.

How many executives, however, would list organizational knowledge and know-how, including business processes, policies and practices, as a valuable and critical asset respective to the success and longevity of the organization?

While most executives readily acknowledge the importance of business process and best practices, it can be difficult to find evidence of any program, project or person who is accountable and responsible for developing and protecting these valuable organizational assets.

Executives that lead nonprofit organizations are particularity vulnerable to the risk associated with overlooking the value inherent in their organizational business processes and the “know-how” that typically resides within the minds of their managers and staff. For example, I recently learned of a nonprofit organization that was facing a significant budget crunch, due to a significant drop in contributions. The crisis wasn’t precipitated by the recession, or the loss of a significant donor or foundation grant. The causal event of this crisis was attributed to the exit of a fund-raising chairperson and most of her committee members. It could easily be argued that the true cause of the crisis was management’s failure to effectively manage and protect critical organizational processes and best-practices, as well as the knowledge and expertise of the people who comprised the fund-raising committee.

This chairperson and her committee were responsible for raising tens of thousands of dollars for the nonprofit each year, through special fund-raising events. Over the years, committee managers and members improved their fund-raising process, including the tools that they used to plan, implement and manage events. Marketing materials were developed, tested and refined. Promotional scripts used to solicit sponsors and attendees were written, tested and improved upon. PC and online information systems were developed to automate activities and tasks, and enable the team to collaborate remotely which improve efficiency and productivity.

All of this was good, except for the fact that nobody was made responsible and accountable for documenting exactly how things got done. So, when the committee chair and most of the members of this fund-raising team decided to move on out of the organization to pursue other interests, the nonprofit Director found herself in a serious jam. Out the door, too, along with her staff, went all of the knowledge, expertise, processes, best-practices and managing/support tools needed to raise the funds that would keep the organization fiscally sound.

While the new fund-raising committee chairperson and new members had some material and information to work with, what remained of the prior committee’s work was sketchy and largely unorganized. Much of the know-how resided on committee members personal computers and in their own “gray matter”. The new committee decided to start from scratch and develop everything associated with fund-raising events anew. The previous existing assets had taken many years of time and thousands of dollars of investment to develop and perfect. In addition to the obvious loss of time, money and energy, the new committee and chair would likely find they also do not have the time they need to begin anew and still meet or exceed the previous years fund-raising amount.

Today, many for-profit and nonprofit organizations understand the significant value of managing their business processes, best-practices and policies as valuable organizational assets. Many companies have process improvement programs and initiatives in place, with managers and staff who are both accountable and responsible for documenting, analyzing, improving and managing how an organization successfully operates.

Business methodologies supported by software applications are available for personal computing platforms. For virtual organizations, web-based collaborative services enable geographically dispersed team members to work together online at any hour of the day. Many solutions are affordable for even the smallest company or nonprofit organization, so cost is no longer a factor when it comes to managing organizational knowledge assets. As more Board members and managing executives become aware of reasonable strategies to manage and protect these kinds of organizational assets, more organizations will be able to invest more in continuous improvement of best practices rather than re-inventing creating lost knowledge-based assets.

In future posts, I’ll introduce some of the methodologies, strategies and collaborative tools that can be used to develop, implement and protect organizational best-practices and business processes.

The GTD Times team recently posted Year-End Completions to help professionals objectively review 2009, and consider personal and professional goals and objectives for 2010. I found the “Creating a New Year” questions provides some good food for thought when reviewing plans for a new year.

In his coaching tips, David provides a framework for categorizing answers to questions, which can be used to gauge the “balance” of a professional’s life. This framework includes the following categories: Physical, Emotional, Mental, Spiritual, Financial, Family, Community Service, and Leisure (Fun / creativity/ recreation). Assigning a category to the answer to each 2009 / 2010 questionnaire provides perspective on where time, energy and effort is invested.

We now live in a world that is globally interconnected by the Internet. Business enterprises of all sizes are accomplishing great things through applications that support virtual collaboration. The number and types of professionals that can work productively outside of a physical office space continues to grow. Powerful web-based business applications supported by processed-based methodologies enable both businesses and professionals do more with less, with greater efficiency and less waste.

This blog will explore how organizations and professionals are succeeding and growing, working in today’s collaborative virtual workspace.