Adaptive Case Management – Informativer Sammelband

the same, using Google to translate:

Adaptive Case Management – Informative anthology

As a primer on ACM, the book is definitely a success. If someone who knew nothing about ACM, BPM, and the whole raging debate around the two read this book, they’d be well armed to make up their own mind about the issue.

it tackles ACM from a range of perspectives: from private sector to public sector, from insurance and financial services to manufacturing and health care, from SMB to global F500 organizations, the authors show us ACM in many different contexts.

each chapter is self-contained, so readers can dip in and out of the text in whatever order to get what they need, which makes the work very practical to use

Thanks, Joe!

Here is a copy of one review:

First and foremost, the book is about knowledge work. Peter Drucker defined this term to mean not just people who have a lot of knowledge (e.g. professors) or manage a lot of knowledge (e.g. librarians) but actually anyone who has a complex job to do that that is hard to define and that requires “experience” to do it. This includes police detectives, investigative reporters, judges, marketing managers, lawyers, doctors, nurses, rescue workers, financial advisers, entrepreneurs, and (most notably) managers and executives. Knowledge workers make up about 40% of the workforce, and growing.

The opposite of knowledge work is routine work. Routine work can be defined and predicted in a standard Scientific Management sense. The job is repeatable enough, that one can define a fairly fixed way to perform the job. For example, from the time a book is ordered on Amazon, to the time that the book is delivered to the customer, all of the work required is routine. You can write a fairly detailed plan of what exactly must be done, how to handle low stock situations, how to get it shipped, etc. in advance without having to know much at all about the specific book that will be ordered. There are exceptional cases, but 99.99% of all book can be handled with a standard process.

Most of the practice of management has focused on optimizing routine work: defining well designed work descriptions or process diagrams. Training people to do the job in a very repeatable way. Continually assessing the performance, and looking for ways to improve it.

In the past two decades we have seen a whole host of technologies (called workflow, business process management, etc.) to help support the automation or facilitation of routine work.

However, such techniques are not applicable for the unpredictable nature of knowledge work. The exact work that needs to be done for knowledge work depends very strongly on the situation. For example, the merger between United Airlines and Continental Airlines with have some things that need to be done that are unique to this particular merger, and that no other merger between companies will need. While there are patterns and similarities between mergers, you can’t make a process diagram that represent (to any level of detail) exactly what has to be done for a merger, because every merger is different.

Knowledge workers are people who come to work without a well defined script for what they will be doing that day. Paramedics can not tell you how many emergencies they will handle in the coming day. Lawyers and judges can not tell you what the state of a case will be tomorrow. Product designers can not accurately estimate the number of design breakthroughs they will have in a period of time. Detectives can not tell you in advance everyplace they will need to visit in order to follow the trail of clues. All of these people “figure out” what they need to do, as they do it.

The book “Mastering the Unpredictable” is a collection of writings from 12 different experts in the field to discuss how knowledge work must be handled, and proposes capabilities that a technology would need to effectively support knowledge workers. Since you can’t predict in advance exactly what will be done, you need to give people the ability to plan the work as they go along. This means that the planning can not be relegated to a highly specialized skill, but instead needs to be something that anyone and everyone can do.

“Mastering the Unpredictable” lays out a vision for how knowledge workers can use social networks, communications technology, document sharing, in order to be more effective at coordinating work using a collection of capabilities labeled “Adaptive Case Management” (ACM). ACM starts by giving workers a place to express their goals, and subgoals, and then manage those goals to completion. Goal orientation is one aspect of ACM, but you also need strong communications, records keeping, and document management. The purpose of ACM is not to constrain what a person can do at any time, but instead to put all possible actions within easy reach, so that the knowledge worker can execute quickly, responding to any situation as it comes up.

I hope that gives you an idea. Each of the contributors is passionate about the subject, and really try to give you a “glimpse over the hill” for this coming trend in both technology and management practice.

Also see a few comments by Martin Baronitz.

Producing the kindle version is a bit of a struggle.  They don’t accept PDF files, and the book was layed out in InDesign, which they don’t take either.  You can output to a web format, but the problem there is that all the graphics are reduced to screen resolution.  I don’t know if the kindle has a zoom-in mode to view the graphics or not, but the kind of detail that we put into the graphics can not always be distinguished on the kindle.  Our solution has been to offer the high resolution images here on the web.  Note that the slides can be zoomed full screen, and the result is that you can seem more detail than even that of the printed book.

Gathering Proposals

What should be discussed?  We are looking for proposal for presentation topics.  There is a list below in the “Summary of Topics” but these are only suggestions.   Please make a comment on this blog post.  Challenge us with your best!

Information

The hottest trend today is the rise of interest in case management. It has been described as an “Old Idea that Catches New Fire”. While traditional BPM handles routine, repeatable processes, much of the work in an office place is neither routine nor repeatable. Office workers are increasingly performing what is called “knowledge work” which combines the planning of work, together with doing the work. The result is that the handling of each case might be uniquely planned to take advantage of the particularities of that case.

Who Should Attend?

Case Management Mentors are looking ahead of the curve to see what possibilities are coming, and are interested in exploring today and anticipating what will be coming tomorrow.

A mentor might be:

• An industry analyst who advises companies on the best direction
• A consultant who works inside a company to increase efficiency
• A trainer who delivers courses on new technology
• A writer or journalist who write forward thinking books and articles
• Anyone in corporate management wanting to keep on top of trends to improve efficiency of organizations

What is a Case Management Mentor?

Mentors need to study, share and exchange best practices for using case management: what works, what does not work, what is the most effective way to train people, what things to avoid, and what is just vendor marketing hype. This camp is for getting under the surface, and networking to find the best techniques.

Its a full day gathering of analysts, coaches, mentors, managers, consultant, developers, business people, tool providers, investors to discuss experience, strategies, and techniques in adaptive process and adaptive case management. Rub elbows with the industry experts and others who are struggling to train teams to use ACM. Share what works and what to avoid.

Overview

Its a full day gathering of coaches, mentors, managers, developers, business people, tool providers, investors to discuss experience, strategies, and techniques in adaptive process and adaptive case management. Rub elbows with the industry experts and others who are struggling to train teams to use ACM. Share what works and what to avoid.

Don’t expect a single organizer to set the entire agenda. Don’t expect to sit and have people speak at you hour after hour. This day is interactive and the discussion topics are set by the attendees. Talks are short, and lots of time for questions, answers, and discussion.

Set on the Friday after the end of the BPM 2010 Conference, in the same location: Steven’s Institute in Hoboken New Jersey – right across from Manhattan. It is easy for BPM 2010 attendees to stay an additional day and participate in the next thing after BPM.

Summary of Agenda Topics

We don’t know precisely which topics will be covered (that will be decided the first session of the event). Topics will chosen to center around the practice of Adaptive Case Management, and other techniques to support knowledge workers. Subjects might include:

• What are the similarities, differences and key trends for Adaptive Case Management vs. Business Process Management?
• How would I know if I need case management?
• Who in an organization should care about ACM? Why?
• What are some specific examples of knowledge work that ACM supports?
• What is the primary benefit that a knowledge worker/case manager gets by using ACM? How about a manager?
• How does analytics enter the picture?
• Describe how process modeling for ACM might differ from BPM. Will BPMN be useful for ACM?
• Is there such a thing as “Social BPM” or “Social Case Management”? What does that mean to you?
• Do we really expect ACM to displace the current tools used by knowledge workers?
• How do you measure success in an ACM implementation?
• What are some best practices for getting started with ACM?
• What process improvement methodology/discipline are you using with Case Management – does it matter?

Don’t see the topic that you want discussed? Suggest it! As we mentioned above, the actual conference session topics will be set first thing on Friday morning. The schedule for the day is as follows.

Adaptive Case Management Mentor Camp