Dynamic Case
Management
by Don Schuerman, Ken Schwarz,
and Bruce Williams
Foreword by Eamonn Cheverton
Pega Special Edition
Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774 www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
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Table of Contents
Foreword . . . . vii
Introduction . . . .1
About This Book ... 1
Icons Used in This Book ... 2
Beyond the Book ... 2
Chapter 1: Discovering DCM . . . .3
DCM Defined ... 3 Investigating the Case ... 4 Managing the Details ... 6 Goal-driven DCM ... 6 Detail-oriented DCM ... 8Silos Are for Farmers ... 10
Dynamic Work for the Digital Age ... 11
Customer life cycle ... 12
Work life cycle ... 13
Where life cycles meet ... 13
Chapter 2: Getting Value from DCM . . . .15
Keeping Customers Happy ... 15
Knowing your customers ... 16
Connecting across channels ... 16
Adapting to the situation ... 17
Driving work to done ... 18
Keeping promises ... 20
Improving Efficiency ... 20
Giving just enough information ... 21
Setting priorities ... 21
Being social... 21
Automating ... 22
Connecting to the Internet of Things ... 23
Gaining operational visibility and control ... 24
Rules and regulations ... 24
Changing at the Pace of Market Demands ... 25
Business–IT collaboration ... 26
Direct capture of objectives ... 26
Business rules ... 27
Design by doing... 27
Repeatability and scale ... 28
Chapter 3: Organizing Your Work for DCM . . . .31
Defining Case Types ... 31
Knowing Where Your Parents and Children Are ... 33
Managing complexity ... 34
Working in parallel ... 35
Adding children to a parent ... 35
Breaking Cases into Work Stages ... 36
Meaningful stages ... 36
Milestones as markers ... 37
Tasks and processes ... 37
Service levels and deadlines ... 37
Alternative stages ... 38
Resolution: The final stage ... 39
Thinking about Reuse ... 39
Chapter 4: Get ting Case Work Done . . . .41
Seeing the Power of Automation ... 41
Getting the Data Right ... 42
Structured and unstructured business data ... 43
Systems of record ... 44
Case metadata ... 45
Automating with Processes ... 46
Guiding with Rules and Analytics ... 47
Guided processing ... 48
DCM and Big Data ... 48
Tracking the Unpredictable ... 49
Chapter 5: Bringing DCM to the Enterprise . . . .51
Selling DCM to Employees ... 51
Understanding Roles and Responsibilities ... 52
Business ... 52
IT team ... 53
Program governance ... 54
Starting Small, Winning Fast ... 55
Going over the waterfall... 55
Table of Contents
v
Measuring and Improving ... 57
Using the operational dashboard ... 57
Targeting DCM improvements ... 58
Reusing, Customizing, and Repeating ... 59
Scaling Success ... 61
Chapter 6: DCM in Action . . . .63
This Flight Is Not Delayed ... 63
One Claim to Rule Them All ... 64
Comfort and Confidence for the Elderly ... 65
Citizen Case ... 66
Getting on Board ... 67
Keeping Patients Well ... 68
Keeping Patients Satisfied... 68
How May I Help You? ... 69
Chapter 7: Nine Best Practices of DCM . . . .71
Review Past Work ... 71
Get the Decision-Makers in the Room ... 71
Look at Work through Your Customers’ Eyes ... 72
Report on Your Goals ... 72
Act Project, Think Program ... 73
Avoid Jargon ... 73
Wrap and Renew ... 73
Think Digital ... 74
Learn by Doing ... 74
Chapter 8: Ten DCM Pitfalls to Avoid . . . .75
Leaving Business Out of Design ... 75
Not Getting Executive Support ... 76
Taking On Too Much ... 76
Paving the Cow Paths ... 76
Inviting Analysis Paralysis ... 77
Losing Control of Change ... 77
Not Being Agile ... 77
Skimping on the Skills Budget ... 78
Underestimating Data Integration Challenges ... 78
Appendix A: Resources . . . .79
Blogs and Community Forums ... 79
Web Resources ... 80
Books and eBooks ... 81
Conferences ... 81
Consultancies ... 82
Analysts ... 83
Pega ... 84
Other Technology Vendors ... 84
Look Around You! ... 84
Foreword
H
eathrow Airport, February 2008. As Enterprise Architect, I was tasked to source the next generation in Airport Sys-tems for one of the world’s busiest airports, London Heathrow. The brief was to find systems that would help Heathrow become a proactively managed organization. I had trawled through all the current offerings within the aviation sector, but there was nothing available to meet the brief.I wanted a solution designed around reusable business ser-vices, a system that could adapt and respond to the events in a dynamic environment. These were the thoughts I had in my head while sitting in Heathrow Airport, awaiting a flight to the Gartner Business Process Management conference in Las Vegas. I had defined a Business Architecture and divided Heathrow into a set of abstracted capabilities. It was planned these capa-bilities would become our reusable system components going forward. What was now required was a solution to “plan, do, and review” these components.
As I watched the aircraft land, get turned around, and depart, I had my Eureka moment: I was watching case management! The landing of aircraft could be understood as the opening of a case. The turnaround — getting the plane on to its next flight — is case management. And closing the case occurs when the aircraft departs. I had abstracted the capabilities and processes of the airport away from aviation and into the domain of commercial off-the-shelf systems.
My optimism faded rapidly, though, as it appeared there was no toolset available to provide the support needed. Undeterred, I attended a conference lunch to hear Pega CEO Alan Trefler give a presentation on the execution gap. Finally, I could see some synergy between our needs and the software industry. But this view was not initially shared by the team from Pega. There was much skepticism in how a toolset proven in banking, healthcare and insurance could be of use to some airport far, far, away with no structured workflow. After many diagrams and some smoke and mirrors, I got Pega to understand just how suitable dynamic case management (DCM) was for managing aircraft operations.
On my return, I set up further meetings and arranged for a proof of concept to be built. The system had to be robust as the systems we had in mind were mission critical. It also had to be flexible for business users to change constraints to the systems without involving the IT department. Another benefit enabled Heathrow to move toward an adaptive approach to software development. Following on from the success of the proof of concept it was decided to use DCM as the method to deliver collaborative decision making (CDM) for Heathrow. CDM is a European initiative to encompass airports within the airspace network. For the first time, information would be shared among all stakeholders (airports, airlines, air traffic control, and ground handlers) in real time. All stakeholders would be able to see how the effect on one party’s actions would affect the others. The solution moved the airport from being integrated at a data level to being integrated at the process level — in real time. The airport now knows, with a high degree of accuracy, the time of arrival of an aircraft, allowing the efficient use of ground-based resources. To-the-minute monitoring of the aircraft turnaround on the ground allows accurate departure times to be forwarded to the network operator, resulting in a more balanced airflow of some of the world’s busiest airspace. Aircraft now push back from the stand at the optimum time. Aircraft now spend on aver age two minutes less time taxiing out to departure. This reduction results in a saving of millions of dollars to the airlines in fuel, and a reduction in noxious emissions in the thousands of millions of tons to the environment. Heathrow’s on-time depar-ture rate has gone from 67 percent to 91 percent. This is a considerable feat when you consider that the runways operate at 97 percent capacity, 365 days a year, with a departure rate at 46 movements per hour per runway.
Heathrow has been transformed by the adoption of DCM. Some were uncertain when we started our journey six years ago, but commitment to the practices outlined in this book helped ensure our success. Each and every day, airlines and passengers benefit from the improved communication, collaboration and response provided by DCM.
Eamonn Cheverton
Enterprise Architect, BAA-Heathrow London, May 2014
Introduction
N
o matter what industry you’re in, your business has two types of work: predictable and unpredictable. Highly predictable work can be scripted and programmed, but unpredictable work requires quick thinking and constant decision-making. For decades, managing these different types of work has been a difficult and confusing task — generally involving two different management approaches. Traditional control methods, such as workflow and business process management (BPM), support predictable work. More recently, advances in what’s known as case management have helped address the less-predictable types of work.Today, however, you can use a single approach — dynamic case management (DCM) — to manage all the work in your organization. DCM engages people and technologies, allowing you to define work in terms of a resolution and then manage a collection of tasks to achieve the desired outcomes. It empow-ers people and systems to respond to events and make faster, better, more accurate decisions — allowing them to work more efficiently while also better serving customers. DCM represents a new level of maturity and sophistication in enterprise-class management — and enterprise-class soft-ware. Because it’s both goal- and detail-oriented, it encom-passes both predictable and unpredictable tasks. In a world of increasing complexity, DCM provides simplicity.
About This Book
Dynamic Case Management For Dummies, Pega Special Edition, is more than just an overview of DCM. It also covers the meth-odology’s business management and information technology aspects, and delves into the rules-driven foundation on which DCM is built.
We wrote this book not only to help you understand DCM, but also to serve as a business reference while you practice
everyday DCM. Because the book covers the basics, it’s necessarily brief, so you’ll want to follow up on some of the areas that are most interesting or important to you (see “Beyond the Book” later in this introduction, and Appendix B, “References”).
Icons Used in This Book
In the margins of this book, you see some helpful little icons that pinpoint particular types of information.
The Tip icon provides helpful details on implementing DCM successfully.
The Remember icon denotes key concepts that you should keep in mind.
The Technical Stuff icon indicates a technical item.
The Warning icon flags a risk or pitfall that could get you into trouble.
Beyond the Book
Although this book is stuffed with information, we can only cover so much in 96 short pages! So, if you find yourself want-ing more information about dynamic case management, just go to www.pega.com or www.dcm4dummies.com. There you can find more information about Pega, DCM, and how you can apply these capabilities to achieve new levels of business performance.
Chapter 1
Discovering DCM
In This Chapter
▶ Understanding cases
▶ Managing details in the context of outcomes ▶ Moving work across silos
L
ike most people who are new to dynamic case management (DCM), you probably have lots of questions. Exactly what is a case? How is DCM different from workflow or business pro-cess software? What does that whole dynamic thing mean? This chapter helps you find answers to those questions — and more.DCM Defined
DCM is about getting business work done. In this context, work means the tasks and activities people perform every day at organizations large and small. Work can be releasing a new product, setting up a new customer account, or helping a cus-tomer with a service request. Work is dynamic, driven by new situations, stimulated by new opportunities, and initiated by smart people who combine experience and intellect to invent better ways to get things done.
DCM is a software-based approach to managing, improving, and ultimately automating work by helping people get that work done. DCM software allows business people to collabo-rate in real time with information technologists, which pro-vides several benefits:
✓ Business leaders gain more visibility into their opera-tions, giving them the insights they need to increase pro-ductivity through simplification.
✓ Technologists and developers collaborate directly with business experts to deliver applications that enable their businesses to meet changing market demands.
✓ Customers and employees are better engaged and more empowered by systems that perform the heavy lifting without boxing them into rigid processes that don’t fit their needs.
✓ The enterprise can quickly scale from pilot to enterprise transformation through the reuse of technology assets and best practices.
The journey is well worth your while. It makes employees more productive and also raises customer satisfaction. DCM truly is a better way to get work done.
Investigating the Case
The core of DCM is the case: a piece of work that delivers a business outcome. The outcome of a case is a meaningful deliverable provided to a customer, partner, or internal stake-holder. A deliverable can be processing an auto-insurance claim, onboarding a new mortgage, or designing and releasing a new product, for example. In all these examples, the work to be done can be defined in terms of its resolution (the insur-ance claim is paid, the new account is opened, or the new product is released).
A case and a task are different things. Unlike a case, which is a business outcome, a task is a point-in-time assignment that must be accomplished. Cases manage a collection of tasks to drive a meaningful business outcome.
Likewise, a case isn’t a process. Whereas a case is a piece of work that needs to get done, a process is one of the ways in which that work may be completed. Most work is bigger than a single process, so many cases have multiple processes chug-ging away simultaneously.
Chapter 1: Discovering DCM
5
Think of a case as being the electronic folder that includes all the tasks, documents, and information needed to complete a piece of work. Like a folder, a case provides a single place to access everything you need. Unlike a folder, however, a case also contains the intelligence to retrieve the information you need, drive the processes you want, manage escalations and urgency, detect changes, and make the decisions needed to achieve the desired outcome. This intelligence is central to the value DCM provides organizations.
In computer-science terms, you can think of a case as being the object that gets worked on. Like any object in an object-oriented programming model, the case object has attributes (deadlines, urgency, current status, creator name, and so on) and is acted on by methods, which in DCM could include pro-cesses, ad hoc tasks, or business events.
Getting a case to resolution requires managing people, docu-ments, systems, information, and even things. Working a case involves one or more of the following tasks (see Figure 1-1):
✓ Coordinating multiple tasks, often across people and departments, and sometimes beyond the boundaries of a single organization
✓ Managing the people and stakeholders associated with a case, the most important of which generally is a customer
✓ Aggregating information from a variety of sources, includ-ing documents, images, and data from other computer systems
✓ Complying with processes and rules mandated either by best practices or regulations
✓ Detecting and responding to events that may affect the urgency or status of the case
✓ Reporting on status and history for management visibil-ity and/or continuous improvement
Source Pegasystems.
Figure 1-1: The elements that make up a case.
Managing the Details
DCM is about getting work done, which means delivering meaningful business outcomes. But simply defining and track-ing progress toward a goal doesn’t necessarily improve the way you get there. DCM is powerful because it allows you to manage and improve the details of how work gets done in the context of the desired outcome.
Don’t confuse the unstructured, unpredictable nature of DCM with freeform collaboration or even project management tools. Like DCM, these tools can track and manage ad hoc tasks and decisions, but DCM is driven by outcomes. DCM combines structured processes and ad hoc work to drive work toward a goal rather than just tracking tasks as they’re completed.
Goal-driven DCM
For years, the software industry has trained business people and technologists to think about business processes — how to define, execute, monitor, and optimize them. This technique
Chapter 1: Discovering DCM
7
has been largely successful because sizeable parts of business operations can be described as processes: predictable steps repeated over and over with minimal variation. The way a com-pany manufactures a car or processes credit card payments may be very complex, for example, but the steps involved are repeatable and predictable. With enough research, automotive manufacturers and credit card companies can diagram their business processes.
Most large — and many small or medium-sized — organizations operate at a level of complexity that makes end-to-end process modeling (mapping a full process from start to finish) practi-cally impossible. Organizations need to implement automation, tracking, and management without spending years modeling end-to-end processes — especially ones that cross multiple departments.
In addition, large chunks of work simply aren’t repeatable or predictable. Consider a few examples:
✓ An analyst investigating financial fraud won’t know what steps to take next until the root and extent of the problem — and its relationship to other investigations — becomes clear.
✓ A nurse managing the long-term care of a diabetic patient may need to change plans based on an unpredicted spike in a routine blood test.
✓ A field technician responding to a failure at an oil well may be defining a new solution or even creating a new best practice on the fly.
In all these examples, the goal of each case is clear:
✓ The fraud investigator must determine whether a crime was committed and build a case for prosecution. ✓ The nurse wants to keep the patient healthy.
✓ The field technician wants to get the oil well running safely again.
In each case, the precise steps required to reach the goal are determined on the fly. Nothing about these types of work is routine. In fact, the work is best described as exploratory, in that the workers are progressing toward a goal and deciding the detailed steps along the way.
Even work that’s very structured or predictable may spin off exceptions that aren’t structured or predictable.
Detail-oriented DCM
The outcome of a case — the goal — is hugely important, but the details matter, too. Stakeholders care how a case got to its outcome.
In some cases, processes and rules must be enforced, or tasks must be prescribed as responses to events. These processes and rules are often driven by regulation, especially in highly reg-ulated industries such as financial services, government, health care, and telecommunications. Also, organizations often want their work to confirm to established best practices, thereby ensuring efficiency or delivering a satisfactory level of customer service.
Details matter in hindsight as well. Regulators and sharehold-ers continually ask businesses to provide audit information or prove that a best practice was followed. Organizations that want to improve the way they get work done need to study how previous cases were completed. Only by analyzing the details of previous work can they discover and test opportuni-ties to improve efficiency.
DCM allows you to manage the details of how work gets done in the context of the business outcomes and goals that define why the work is being done in the first place.
Chapter 1: Discovering DCM
9
Thinking about cases
The more you learn about case work, the more you can see DCM in every-day life.
Most work isn’t 100 percent routine or 100 percent ad hoc. Most work is a mix. For routine work, you can simply follow a standard procedure to get it done. But other parts of your work aren’t routine at all: There’s no par-ticular order or defined set of steps, and it takes a combination of judg-ment, experience, and contributions from different people to get it done properly.
Consider the job of a police detective, who takes on an unsolved crime and pursues it until the case is closed. The police call it a case, and it has the same meaning as case in DCM. The detective develops a list of sus-pects, collects evidence, speaks to witnesses, and tries to piece together what happened. He con-sults other detectives, examines criminal data records, and sends fin-gerprints and forensic DNA samples to labs for analysis.
Much of that work is standard pro-cedure. But he also performs ad hoc
work. He follows hunches and intu-ition in deciding who he interviews, what he says, and in what order he chases leads. There are many possi-ble ways to solve the crime. Flexibility is important for this aspect of the work.
Whether following standard proce-dures or performing ad hoc work, at all times detectives must obey regulations governing permis-sible search and seizure, for filing evidence, and interviewing sus-pects and witnesses. Improperly obtained evidence will not stand up in court.
Feel like you’ve seen this show before? Police, legal, and hospital television dramas are all examples of DCM — the combination of prescrip-tive and ad hoc work, orchestrated to achieve the optimal outcome — in about 42 minutes of air time.
DCM helps organize routine and ad hoc work — and drive it to resolu-tion, no matter how complicated or how many people or systems are involved.
Silos Are for Farmers
Understanding and managing details become increasingly important as organizations become more complex. Most large companies and even many smaller ones are broken into work groups, or silos. Work silos are often created for functional areas (Sales, Marketing), product lines (Retail, Commercial), or even regions (North America, Europe). Very large compa-nies even have silos within their silos.
This division of labor is often essential for managing people and providing budgetary accountability, but it can make get-ting the work done very difficult. Work silos are especially troublesome for cases that involve servicing or fulfilling cus-tomer requests, because this type of work often crosses multi-ple silos, and exposing this level of organizational commulti-plexity to your customers is a recipe for disaster.
Work can fall into gaps between silos, leaving your customers’ requests unfulfilled and your promises to them unmet.
DCM, however, makes it easy for work to travel across silos. The case provides a container for everything that has been done and will be done to complete the request (see Figure 1-2). By tracking what tasks are assigned to whom, DCM provides accountability across silos. Because the case is focused on the outcome — such as fulfilling a request — it can ensure that promises to customers are kept.
Source Pegasystems.
Chapter 1: Discovering DCM
11
Dynamic Work for the
Digital Age
Today’s world demands DCM. New technologies have created new ways to communicate and get work done. Customers can reach out to you via mobile applications and social networks, and the simple interactions that used to take place on the phone or face to face now bounce between different channels. Customers demand that service be as easy as buying from Amazon.com or visiting the Apple Store, and when they don’t get the service they want, they’re empowered to broadcast their opinions via social media.
Organizations have important needs, too:
✓ They need a way to manage and respond to empowered customer engagement.
✓ They need to be able to pull all the interactions related to a service request into a single place.
✓ They need to shield customers from their own organiza-tional complexity so that customers don’t have to navi-gate a web of organizational silos.
✓ They need to ensure that customer requests never fall between the cracks and that promises are never broken. ✓ They need to respond and act in real time when they get
an unexpected customer request.
Trying to diagram a business process that meets all these goals, however, would be almost impossible. Most companies don’t have enough whiteboard space to handle it. Some tasks aren’t completed in any particular order; others can be kicked off only after other tasks are completed. New processes can spin off without warning. Work is complex, ad hoc, and adap-tive. That’s where DCM comes in.
Static, structured processes don’t stand up to constant change. DCM allows a business to spin on a dime in response to chang-ing needs. With DCM, users can add new tasks to work already in process, change the way a case is being handled, or even draw new business processes on the fly. DCM allows business
to move more quickly in managing their most complex work. This type of flexibility puts the dynamic into dynamic case management.
Business processes can manage the predictable and struc-tured parts of a case, but much of the work that takes place in business is unpredictable. DCM is about managing the struc-tured and the unstrucstruc-tured.
Managing the needs of your increasingly empowered custom-ers and the operational needs of your increasingly complex business means driving improvement at the intersection of two life cycles: the customer life cycle and the work life cycle.
Customer life cycle
The customer life cycle is the journey your customers take when they engage in business with your company. In fact, marketers and customer service professionals often call this life cycle the customer journey.
The journey starts even before customers are aware that your company exists. Ideally, through web searches, advertisements, articles, or word of mouth, they come to know your company and what it offers. They may visit your website, browse in your physical store, or follow your Twitter account. At a certain point, they may realize that your offerings might fill their needs, so they dig in deeper and evaluate your products. If a product is a good fit, a customer will buy it.
The customer’s journey continues beyond that initial purchase, of course, because he or she gets to experience what it’s like to own your products or consume your services. If the experience is a good one, the customer becomes an advocate and may recommend you to friends and colleagues. If you build a strong, enough bond, the customer may buy again — often with much less work and investment on your part.
When customers choose to buy a product, it has to be simple for them to get their orders fulfilled. When they have problems, expert help should be easy to find.
Chapter 1: Discovering DCM
13
Work life cycle
The work life cycle inside your company describes how work gets done: where it starts, how it’s organized, what responses are sent, and how the work is resolved. Navigating this life cycle correctly means moving across the silos of your organi-zation. You must keep track of all the work you’re doing, esca-lating tasks that aren’t meeting their milestones or service levels so that you can ensure timely resolution and customer satisfaction.
Where life cycles meet
DCM lives at the intersection of the customer and work life cycles (see Figure 1-3). Having a case allows you to track a customer request across various channels. You can see the customer’s history so you can predict and adapt to what he or she may do next.
Many organizations mistakenly believe that there’s a trade-off between optimizing their customers’ experiences and improving their own internal operations. The prevailing wisdom is that you can’t save money and deliver great customer service. With DCM, however, you can improve the way you engage with your cus-tomers and simplify your operations. You can generate more rev-enue and lower your costs. Further, by simplifying the way your company works, you make your customer experience better.
Source Pegasystems.
If that outcome sounds like something you want for your busi-ness, you need DCM.
Combining DCM with BPM
Some of our discussion of DCM may sound a little familiar. Proponents of business process management (BPM) — including the authors of this book — have been advocating the use of BPM to drive efficiency, bridge gaps between silos, and manage change. What is the rela-tionship between BPM and DCM? A case in DCM is a piece of work that needs to get done. A process is one of the ways in which that work may be completed, which is where BPM comes in. Most work is bigger than a single process, so many cases have
multiple processes chugging away simultaneously.
BPM means different things to differ-ent people. For some people, BPM is a discipline and a process-oriented approach to business improvement; for others, BPM is also a technology used to define and execute business processes. This technology often takes the form of a business process management suite (BPMS) that pulls together many functions, such as process modeling, process execu-tion, business rules, and reporting.
Chapter 2
Getting Value from DCM
In This Chapter
▶ Improving customer experience ▶ Finding work efficiencies
▶ Improving management visibility and control ▶ Keeping up with market demands
D
ynamic case management (DCM) brings together the people and information needed to get work done com-pletely and correctly the first time — and every time. In this chapter, you discover what DCM can do for you and your business.Keeping Customers Happy
The digital revolution has brought customers the convenience of 24/7 service, but too often, this service comes at the cost of quality. Nobody likes clumsy interactive voice response sys-tems, long waits to talk to a live agent, or impersonal and inef-fective service. Yet these experiences are commonplace. Your customers will trust and respect you only if they feel that you know them, you have their best interests at heart, and you can answer their questions and resolve their problems quickly and completely.
By making every customer interaction an opportunity to dem-onstrate excellent service, DCM drives high levels of customer satisfaction and increases the value of customer relationships. Here’s how.
Knowing your customers
A DCM system makes it much easier for your customer-facing employees to know your customers and their relation-ship with your organization.
Because it connects to your customer records and tracks every customer interaction, it can instantly present to your customer-facing employees the critical details of the rela-tionship when the customer calls. These details include:
✓ Accounts, purchase, and service history ✓ History of this service request or complaint
✓ Emotional relationship with the customer (satisfied or unhappy; history of complaints)
✓ Importance of the customer (large or small; growing or declining)
A DCM system spares customers the nuisance of explaining their situations every time they call. When they’re aware of customers’ background, customer service representatives can focus on listening and understanding new information, and can engage customers in more meaningful conversations. Some customer cases are resolved right away; for others, reso-lution can take days, weeks, or months. During that time, the people who work on the case may change due to altered work shifts, vacations, illness, or even company reorganizations. No matter. The DCM system keeps track of all customer interactions so that whoever works with the customer is always fully aware. Not all customers are necessarily consumers. You can use DCM to improve engagement of prospects, partners, and employees as well.
Connecting across channels
With the rapid growth of mobile devices and social channels, you have new opportunities to serve customers and empower employees wherever they go. Many people are already doing work on their personal phones and tablets, as well as using social sites to stay connected and find answers.
Chapter 2: Get ting Value from DCM
17
Most business systems, however, are designed for specific chan-nels, such as a call center or a website. When you use different systems for different channels, it’s hard to give your customers a consistent experience.
DCM systems are designed to give customers the same experi-ence across different channels (see Figure 2-1). No matter how they contact you, they get good service. A customer can start a case (such as an auto-accident claim) on a mobile phone and then follow up later on a website, by email, or in a phone call to a call center.
Source Pegasystems.
Figure 2-1: Omnichannel user experience.
Adapting to the situation
In many customer-facing situations, blindly following standard procedure isn’t enough.
In 2009, for example, Boston police ticketed a man for driving in the breakdown lane, even though his wife was in labor and he was driving her to the hospital. (The citation was thrown out in traffic court. The police department appealed but changed its mind when the case made the newspapers.) Or consider this example: A credit card customer calls to dispute a $50 charge that she doesn’t recognize. Despite the small amount in question, a customer history free of disputes, and a spotless record of timely payment, she has to speak with four representatives and fill out a form to get this simple work done.
It’s infuriating when people refuse to apply some common sense and don’t think about the bigger picture. Because so many customer situations require some exercise of human judgment, rigid systems and mechanical responses won’t do. A DCM system doesn’t force participants to follow a set script. Rather, it interprets the situation, and intelligently guides flexible decision-making and action by asking and answering questions such as these:
✓ Given the background and the conversation, as well as your organization’s goals, policies, and procedures, what are the customers’ options?
✓ Which actions, products, or services would most likely (based on data on all past customer interactions) to produce the best outcome for the customer and the company?
✓ If escalation is required, which option is best for this customer?
As the conversation with the customer proceeds, the DCM system reevaluates the situation in real time and changes its recommendations to the representative as required in pursuit of the best outcome.
Driving work to done
A person who seeks to set something right wants more than just a response; he or she also wants a timely, complete reso-lution of the matter.
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Too often, though, customers are asked to “Hold, please, while I research that.” Worse, customers are forced to manage the res-olution of their cases themselves. They must navigate the orga-nization manually, following referrals, shepherding work from one representative to the next, and making repeated follow-up calls to ensure that the complicated work is done as promised. DCM systems address both these issues:
✓ They help representatives work fast by automatically pull-ing and displaypull-ing customer background, as well as rele-vant product and service details. Representatives see the whole picture without having to flip from screen to screen or put the customer on hold while processing a transac-tion. Intelligent guidance from the DCM system closes the performance gap between green and seasoned agents. ✓ DCM ensures that every case reaches resolution and that
nothing falls between the cracks, no matter how compli-cated the work becomes. DCM eliminates the overhead and anxiety of manually tracking work that has been handed off. Representatives can concentrate fully on the job at hand: getting the best result for the customer and the company. In the event a customer calls in to seek an update on the status of a case, a representative can
Case-resolution case studies
Many organizations use DCM to intelli-gently guide case resolution and max-imize customer lifetime value. Here are three examples:
✓ Insurance: DCM helps insurers service claims faster, eliminate manual handling of policy changes, track complex cases across mul-tiple back-office functions, and detect fraud auto matically. ✓ Banking: Retail banks use DCM to
resolve retail payment disputes. The system generates scripts and prompts based on the customer
and merchant profile, network regulations, and agent skill level, as well as the bank’s best prac-tices and policies.
✓ Telecommunications: Telecom-munications companies use DCM to improve customer retention. Executing multichannel market-ing strategies with personalized offers that align to customer needs and business goals prevents cam-paign collisions and ensures that offers are timely and consistent.
quickly assess the situation, and see, for example, if the case is under review with a compliance group or with management for authorization.
Keeping promises
How valuable is a promise fulfilled? In 2013, five banks were fined $25 billion for foreclosure-processing abuses during the financial crisis and its aftermath. Simply put, the mortgage servicing industry was ill equipped to help the overwhelming number of homeowners who needed assistance.
Today, one of the biggest of these banks uses DCM to comply with federal regulations requiring them to give borrowers a fair shake. Its DCM default management system cut the time required to modify a loan from 120 days to just 30 days, meet-ing regulatory agreements and increasmeet-ing loan processmeet-ing throughput by 120 percent.
Improving Efficiency
Organizations have many case management challenges, including customer, employee, and partner onboarding; war-ranty, insurance, and health-care claims; incident manage-ment; and emergency response. Efficiently resolving these challenges requires workers who can assess the problem quickly; access the right systems and data; and collaborate across multiple functions, teams, and geographies while fol-lowing company policies and procedures.
DCM works wonders by bringing together all the people and information needed to get work done and reach the best busi-ness outcomes. With DCM, jobs are done faster and done right the first time.
DCM captures the essence of management guru Peter Drucker’s concept of “management by objective,” which states that people are more inventive and engaged when they work together to reach well-defined goals. According to Drucker, too many rigidly defined workflows and rules smother an organization’s ability to innovate. Instead, the organization should give workers the information and people they need to get the job done so that
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they concentrate less on the low-value logistics and more on the higher-value application of judgment.
Giving just enough information
“Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink” was the Ancient Mariner’s lament. You too may feel thirsty — for useful, actionable information in a sea of data. You have to work hard to find what you need and avoid distractions. DCM systems radically improve worker efficiency by auto-matically fetching and presenting the information people need at particular points in managing a case. DCM puts all the information — emails, records, correspondence, and so on — in one place and organizes it for rapid review and understanding. Workers no longer have to consult multiple computer screens or rule books, and the history of the case is immediately visible.Because DCM systems are sensitive to the context of the work being done, only the information relevant to the job at hand is displayed. Simpler screens are easier to read and less likely to create distractions and misunderstanding.
Setting priorities
A DCM system optimizes team productivity by assigning the highest-priority work to the appropriate people at the right time. Work rosters made by traditional systems are typically deliv-ered to teams in daily batches. Savvy workers cherry-pick the easy items that will improve their metrics, leaving the harder items to languish. DCM systems intelligently route priority tasks to the people who have the right skills for that work, ensuring that they’re continuously engaged with important work.
Being social
According to a survey by Avenade, an IT services provider, more than half of all information workers today use social collaboration tools to share documents. They also use these tools to communicate with customers and find experts or
information inside their companies. This behavior makes sense, because people use these tools in their personal lives. Social tools are incredibly intuitive. It’s natural, then, that your employees use them to get their work done in the office. Informal use of social tools in the enterprise bypasses the security, control, and audit of managed business processes. You can’t simply stop people from using social tools. But when social tools are disconnected from the work you’re trying to manage, you can’t trust them to get the job done. Also, those tools can’t be audited later if something goes wrong.
A DCM system solves this problem by incorporating social collaboration into the case management system itself. Users have tools that allow them to find and chat with colleagues who can answer their questions, advance or resolve a case directly from their conversation feeds, and even incorporate conversations from external social media networks. Because all this activity occurs inside the DCM system, all these dis-cussions become part of the case history. Everything is in one place for later review or audit.
Automating
A DCM system goes beyond workflow (the management of the receipt, routing, and reporting on work) to actually automate the response and resolution of that work itself.
Automation can drive tremendous productivity gains when decisions that don’t truly require human judgment can be handled by a system. Automation achieved through the appli-cation of policy (business rules) can make decisions based on the situation and its context. Simple decisions can address issues such as approving an order based on the order size, the customer’s credit rating, and the customer’s business history. More sophisticated automation also includes predictive and adaptive analytics. Advanced analytical capabilities can create an intelligent script for a sales or service representa-tive, including a short list of offers to make to the customer ranked by desirability of those offers to the company. The DCM system analyzes the situation by comparing a cus-tomer’s history with the histories of all other customers and their responses to previous offers; then it produces the script based on the offer most likely to achieve the desired result.
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That’s the predictive aspect. The system continually learns from the response of customers and dynamically adjusts the offers over time. That’s the adaptive aspect.
Use case management reporting to determine what human activities are worth automating. Sometimes, it’s best to hold off on automation in the first phase of project delivery. Use real production data to determine where you’ll get the most value from the automatic application of business rules and analytics. Automation is a key capability for improving not just opera-tional efficiency, but operaopera-tional quality as well. You can use automation to meet or even exceed the skills of your best customer representatives. Automated processes ensure that every interaction is a personal experience that fully leverages all your best practices.
Connecting to the Internet
of Things
From smartphone devices to smart TVs and connected cars, the vision of a connected world is turning into reality. The pro-liferation of connected things sensing and responding to the world around them creates ripe opportunities for innovation. DCM is a core technology for this revolution in connected devices, known as the Internet of Things. Production DCM sys-tems in transportation, health care, and agriculture are among the first systems to create cases in response to events gener-ated by connected devices, coordinating people, systems, and other connected devices in the course of completing that work. Air transport, for example, uses DCM to drive fast turnaround of airplanes at terminals, coordinating and optimizing the flow of millions of passengers and bags, as well as the actions of thousands of employees and systems (see Chapter 6). Many insurance companies now offer customers a smart device to install in their cars. The device tracks a customer’s driving habits, and the insurance company’s DCM system uses that data to underwrite the customer’s policy, based on precise driving records. Premiums can follow the customer’s driving record, and claims can automatically integrate accu-rate data from the car’s smart device.
Gaining operational visibility
and control
You can’t improve what you can’t see. Undocumented manual processes run in the dark, which makes it hard to measure and control individual and team performance. With undocu-mented manual processes, bottlenecks and inefficiencies can fester until customers or employees complain. If you don’t have visibility into the work, it’s impossible to be proactive. DCM gives you real-time views of work, as well as insight into trends and emerging problems, allowing you to take immedi-ate action. Refer to Figure 5-2 to see an example dashboard, in which the data collected feeds directly into Lean Six Sigma process improvement disciplines.
The key to hitting service-level agreements (SLAs) is keeping an eye on milestones. A missed or risky milestone means that time must be made up later through reprioritizing or tempo-rarily assigning more resources. Early warning and the ability to take action are critical to meeting SLAs.
Rules and regulations
If a DCM system gives people leeway to exercise their judg-ment, how can you be confident that they’ll do the right thing? Without a doubt, industry regulations must be followed. Of course, company policies and procedures exist for good rea-sons and must be applied consistently.
DCM uses rules to automatically constrain options and drive outcomes. These rules are the policies of your enterprise and the regulations of your industry. The value of this capabil-ity has grown with the increasing reach and complexcapabil-ity of regulations.
Health insurance, for example, is a heavily regulated industry, and states mandate how quickly claims must be processed. Errors, inconsistencies, and duplications can complicate the processing of a claim, as can lapsed policies and late premium
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payments. All these situations may cause delays, which can lead to fines and interest payments. DCM claims-processing systems have helped a Midwest Blue Cross Blue Shield plan, for example, to increase the automatic resolution of claims by 38 percent and cut late payment fees by a whopping 90 percent.
Audits
Every action in a DCM system — automated or human — is recorded for audit. You can rewind the tape and play back what happened in a case, step by step, seeing who did what and when they did it. Documentation, logs, and data can be produced and tailored to meet compliance requests and regulations.
A DCM system also keeps an audit trail of system changes so that all changes in business rules are transparent as well. The operational and system change history are kept together, so you can even replay actions from systems that have been updated in the past. Compliance officers can review actions and results from old system configurations without needing to rebuild or restore the old systems.
Changing at the Pace of
Market Demands
Business history is littered with cautionary tales of one-hit wonders, companies that lost customer focus as they grew, and moribund firms that couldn’t keep pace with nimbler com-petitors. Were these companies blindsided by change? Some were; others knew what they had to do but couldn’t pull it off. From operational tweaks to profound enterprise transforma-tions (see Chapter 5), DCM provides excellent change manage-ment capability. DCM is strongly outcome-oriented, keeping goals front and center throughout the initiative. Equally impor-tant, the technology involves and empowers the people closest to the business to change the way the business works.
Business–IT collaboration
The success of your DCM project depends on effective col-laboration among business leaders, subject-matter experts, and information technology (IT) professionals.
If you don’t include business people in your DCM system design plan, your DCM initiative will fail.
The good news is that DCM systems themselves facilitate the necessary collaboration, and DCM vendors provide methodol-ogies to ensure that the right people are involved throughout the process.
Direct capture of objectives
It’s much easier to collaborate when everyone is working from the same page. DCM design tools help by capturing business requirements in a way that both business and IT can under-stand. A DCM system visually models all aspects of the system, including high-level case flow, detailed processes, the appear-ance of user screens, and the data to be handled.
At any time, you can demonstrate and verify a DCM system, even in skeletal form, so that everyone can see that it accu-rately models the work you want to be done.
This visually modeled WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) approach eliminates the misunderstandings that plague teams that construct applications with traditional methods. These traditional methods require business analysts to docu-ment requiredocu-ments in painstaking detail; IT analysts translate the requirements into IT designs; then programmers imple-ment the designs into finished applications. Too often, how-ever, the results don’t match what business people expected. The entire process can take so long that the system is obso-lete before it’s done.
By directly capturing business objectives and immediately turning them into demonstrable systems, DCM makes it pos-sible to validate designs during the requirements-gathering sessions.
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Although it’s possible to build a DCM system by using traditional waterfall development methods, in which all requirements are defined before any functional systems are delivered, most DCM systems are built with agile develop-ment methods, in which systems are delivered in a phased approach. Each phase (called a sliver) introduces additional functionality and builds on what came before. An agile approach not only delivers valuable functionality to the busi-ness faster, but also enables participants to review and refine requirements throughout the project. For more on agile and waterfall methods, see Chapter 5.
Business rules
Business rules are policies that govern how work gets done. Through business rules, business people can change the way a DCM system works without running change cycles with the technical teams. This procedure radically reduces the time it takes to update business policy in a fast-changing environ-ment, as these examples illustrate:
✓ A business rule states that all transactions greater than $10,000 must be reviewed by a supervisor. It turns out that this rule generates many more reviews than neces-sary and that a more appropriate value is $20,000. With DCM, an authorized business person is empowered to make that change directly; no programming changes are required.
✓ Some insurance rules vary state by state; others are common across all states. In an organization that uses DCM, when regulations change, business people can change all rules directly in the system, and subsequent processing of claims against these rules follow the new regulations.
Design by doing
For many kinds of work, it’s impossible to predict every eventuality. People encounter circumstances that you didn’t account for in your original case definitions. That’s okay. DCM frees workers to perform ad hoc work as long as it doesn’t violate the policies that govern the work.
Design by doing refers to DCM’s ability to define new case types based on ad hoc work that was actually done. These new case types can then be used by many people to do that kind of work in the future.
Too often, great inventions don’t become true innovations because they aren’t made broadly known or usable. DCM gives you a way to capture the best practices and make them part of the way that work is done.
Design by doing, like any other type of change management, requires thoughtful governance. Just because operational workers can change the way that work is done for the team doesn’t mean that they should. Use design by doing to capture great ideas that feed into your change management discipline.
Repeatability and scale
Standardization and economies of scale drive profitable growth and competitive advantage. Standardized parts enabled mass production, an innovation that left craft indus-try in the dust. Similarly, standardized shipping contain-ers unleashed a dramatic expansion of global commerce. Standardization is also a key principle in simplifying and improving customer experience. For example:
✓ Offering global customers around-the-clock service options with tiered service levels (such as platinum, gold, and silver)
✓ Reducing operational costs and head count by centraliz-ing functions
✓ Introducing global self-service
✓ Cross-selling products across the product portfolio Almost every process improvement and simplification initia-tive, however, involves a terrible conundrum. On one hand, to get more consistent customer experience and more efficient processes, you need to standardize policies and practices across departments, products, channels, and regions. On the other hand, a one-size-fits-all approach is impossible to achieve
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because different departments, products, channels, and regions have distinct needs and legitimate reasons to resist standard-ization. Railroading them won’t work. What can you do?
Large enterprises use DCM to solve this problem by setting up a layered business architecture that establishes shared and common policies and procedures that apply everywhere (see Figure 2-2). Then these enterprises customize these common policies and procedures by specifying how particular groups’ requirements depart from the standard. These departures from the standard (specializations) can themselves be layered. So, for example, a large enterprise can establish global stan-dards that apply everywhere, tailor these global stanstan-dards to meet regulatory requirements of particular countries, and then further specialize them to meet requirements of particu-lar states or provinces.
Source Pegasystems.
Figure 2-2: Layered business architecture separates common services
from specialized services.
The efficiencies produced by this layered approach can be enormous. Imagine a multinational insurance company that manages 5 lines of business through 3 channels in 50 countries. How many claims systems would it need? If you had to build a system for each country, line of business, and channel, you’d have 750 claims processing systems to build and maintain.
A much better approach is to build a single claims process-ing system that’s 90 percent consistent for every claim and 10 percent customized for customers’ unique needs. As a result, you can give customers a consistent experience when the company processes a claim, no matter what products or region the claim involves. You can meet the varied (and often contradictory) regulatory requirements of different regions. Finally, you can get visibility and control of claims processing from top to bottom, no matter what channel originally sold the policy.
It’s all in the model
With traditional business process management (BPM) tools, orga-nizations struggle to manage the complexity of enterprise process improvement. Either they must model every variance and contin-gency in a single complex model, or they must implement a large number of smaller specialized models that represent the various situations. Real-world processes in large organizations typically have too many variants to make either approach practical or cost effective.
DCM handles a layered business architecture by using an object model with inheritance defining the relationships among the common and derived policies and procedures. The key to making this architecture work is ensuring that the object model applies to every artifact of the DCM system: case types, processes, busi-ness rules, user interface screens, data mappings, and so on. A DCM system of this type is easy to repli-cate and scale because every aspect that defines how the system will work is in the model.
Chapter 3
Organizing Your Work
for DCM
In This Chapter
▶ Defining and organizing case types ▶ Working with case stages
▶ Building for reuse
W
e hope that you’re excited about the possibilities and benefits that dynamic case management (DCM) offers your organization and curious about how to get started. In this chapter, you see what you need to know to design a DCM solution.Defining Case Types
The first question to ask when designing a DCM solution is simple: “Where do I start?” You start by defining your case types.
A case type is the definition of a category of work. Creating case types is the first step in defining a DCM solution. Case types include the characteristics that a set of cases share, including the data collected for them and the steps required to get the work done. When users interact with a DCM solution, every case they create is an instance of a defined case type. You might define a case type called Address Change, for example. After that, each time you process a new request to change a customer’s address, that new request creates a new case of type Address Change.
If you’re familiar with object-oriented programming, the par-allels should be obvious. The case type is the class of case you’re implementing, and the cases themselves are objects or instances of that class. Sophisticated DCM systems actually implement an object-oriented hierarchy in which case types can be descendants of other case types. Address Change may be a descendent of a larger Customer Service case type, for example.
Ask yourself two questions when defining your case types: ✓ How would customers describe the various pieces of
work they want done on their behalf?
✓ How would the business describe the outcomes it’s trying to achieve with these types of work?
You may need to ask several people for answers to the second question, including the users of the application, the manager in charge of the department, and perhaps even senior executives. All these stakeholders may have very different perspectives of the desired business outcome. Consider the way that the fol-lowing people might describe a customer address change:
✓ The vice president of customer service might say that the goal is to change the customer’s address quickly and correctly.
✓ The chief marketing officer might say that the goal is to detect a major life event for the customer (such as a new home purchase) and offer relevant products.
✓ An IT director tasked with a master data management project might say that the goal is to ensure that your company has the same contact information for the cus-tomer on all your back-end systems.
Asking multiple people is important, because a piece of work with a business outcome usually reflects smaller pieces of work with meaningful business outcomes of their own. Quite often, to achieve the outcome your customer desires, you need to have multiple simultaneous work streams that are managed and measured independently.
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When you ask managers and executives about the business outcomes they are trying to achieve, their answers are a pretty good indicator of the reports, metrics, and key performance indicators you should bake into your solution.
Knowing Where Your Parents
and Children Are
When you ask different people to describe the outcome of the work you’re trying to improve, you sometimes get different answers. Imagine that you work for a credit card company and have been asked to improve the way your company handles disputed transactions. A disputed transaction is an incorrect or potentially fraudulent transaction that shows up on a cus-tomer’s bill, often in conjunction with some other event, such as a lost or stolen card. If you asked the customer what he wants to happen, he’d probably say, “I lost my wallet. How do you fix everything?”
What happens when you ask your business team? You might get answers like these:
✓ The vice president of your fraud department might say, “We need to make sure we investigate any potential fraud and file the appropriate documentation with the government.”
✓ The vice president of operations might say, “We need to work with our merchants to refund any incorrect payments.”
✓ Your chief marketing officer might say, “We need to get the customer a new card as quickly as possible so he can keep using our products.”
Each of these people has described a case type — that is, each has described a complex piece of work that has a mean-ingful business outcome. In this case, completing the cus-tomer’s outcome (“fix my lost wallet”) depends on completing the other outcomes as well. In this example, you’d call the customer goal (“fix my lost wallet”) the parent case. The other cases are children, subordinate to the parent.
The children of one parent case can also be parents to other child cases. This relationship between parent and child cases is often called the case hierarchy (see Figure 3-1).
Source Pegasystems.
Figure 3-1: Parents and children in a case hierarchy.
Don’t confuse child cases with tasks. Tasks are individual steps completed by a person, often in a single sitting. Cases — even child cases — aggregate multiple tasks to deliver a meaningful business outcome.
Managing complexity
Defining parent and child cases allows different parts of a busi-ness to manage the work they need to manage while still deliver-ing a cohesive experience. Child cases, especially at the bottom of the case hierarchy, often align with the needs of individual departments or teams within an organization. Top-level parent cases often reflect the customer-facing goals. In the example in the preceding section, the customer can monitor and manage the status of his lost-wallet claim without being exposed to the organizational and regulatory complexity needed to address the other pieces of work that must be done.
Creating child cases is one of the ways in which DCM helps insulate your customer from the work silos in your organiza-tion. Organizations develop silos for a good reason: Silos allow a company to manage functional areas and align employees who are working on related tasks. This approach becomes a problem, however, when a large organization with multiple business lines and work silos tries to deliver a cohesive customer experience. Employees struggle to navigate silos, often dealing with multiple systems and applications. Worse,