ļ»æKumar Dattatreyan: Hi, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with Agile Meridian and the Meridian Point. Welcome to another episode of our show on disruption and innovation. Today, we're thrilled to have Daniella Fajardo with us. Daniella is a seasoned business process analyst with a passion for optimizing operations and driving value for organizations. With her expertise in business process management, change management, and cross-functional collaboration, Daniella has consistently delivered impressive results throughout her career. Please join us as we explore her insights on disruption, innovation, and service to her clients. Without further ado, I'm going to bring Daniella on stage. Hi, Daniella.
Daniella Fajardo: Hi, thank you so much for having me here today.
Kumar: Thank you for being here. Business process management - you and I had a conversation about this before. It's interesting because a lot of what you do is improve processes and improve how people work together. Would you tell the audience what business process management is from your perspective?
Daniella: Thank you so much. This is something that's very interesting to me because the key to a company's success is not its individual pieces but really how they're connected to each other. There's a lot of business improvement, process optimization, process monitoring, design, modeling, and so much more. One of the things that people often miss is the current state of your business process. That's the part I love the most because if you think about it from a personal perspective, it's really about assessing yourself, where you are right now, what you're doing in order to grow. Similarly for companies, you have to understand your baseline, your foundation, because once you understand that and what each role is doing, and when they understand role clarity, then it's easier to be able to move on to the next stage of processes or business process management.
Kumar: That makes a lot of sense. So basically, you are sort of like a doctor. You go in and assess how things work. You understand where it's working well, where people are connecting and collaborating, and where it's not working well. And it's not just the people, but it's also the tools, the systems that people use to do their work, correct?
Daniella: That's exactly right. I think about it as two things. The first one is that systems don't talk to systems - people talk to systems. It's really important to build those documents around the processes so that people can understand what they're doing in the process. The second portion is the analogy I always think about is your pantry. If you're going to make a meal, you don't automatically go to the grocery store to buy all the ingredients. You have to look at what's in your pantry to see if you already have some of those ingredients. Because if you don't, you're going to spend so much time at the grocery store. You're going to spend money at the grocery store. And when you come back home, you're going to say, "I already had mustard, tomatoes, onions." So I wasted time and money, and now there are duplicate ingredients. When you think about it from a process perspective, that's why you always have to have your baseline, understand that, so that you don't have those redundancies, so that you can have those efficiencies.
Kumar: I love the analogy of the pantry because I'm one of these people who, when I go to any store, grocery store, I just pick up things because I think, "That looks good. I don't think we have any." Every time we have a cookout, I think we need mayo. And I go buy mayo, but when I come home, I have lots of mayo. I didn't need the mayo.
You mentioned that systems don't talk to systems, people talk to systems. You're right, but a lot of our systems today do talk to other systems. How do you get a sense of whether the information they're passing on to other systems through APIs, through interfaces, is serving the purpose as part of a process assessment?
Daniella: Thank you so much for bringing that up. Even if systems are being integrated with each other and they do talk to each other to some extent, there's the human aspect of somebody having to put data into a system for those systems to talk to each other. Therefore, somebody else has to look at the data or the output of that data. That's to clarify why I said that.
Kumar: Companies are spending a lot of money on AI and automation, and at the decision points where a human would normally make a decision, you can start to introduce AI into those decision points to speed up the process so a human isn't needed necessarily to make that decision. How does that impact your assessment of the process, the tools, the people, and how they all work together?
Daniella: We can think about it from a Salesforce perspective. In Salesforce, there are sometimes chatbots where you can enter your process request, and it'll start feeding you the information. That is where the human component comes into place, and a lot of the governance portion comes in as well. In order for the systems to be able to talk to each other, somebody on the other end has to be maintaining and updating that information. Otherwise, the person receiving that information is not going to receive the correct data. There's always going to be that human component behind it, even though those systems are talking to each other.
Kumar: Well, that's a relief. We won't lose our jobs anytime soon. There is the dock worker strike that's going on right now at the time of this recording. And what they're striking about is automation taking away their jobs. What is your feeling on how automation could really eliminate some people's jobs as part of a process?
Daniella: Going back to the chatbot example, that is something that is feeding you information that you would have asked an actual person - maybe somebody in operations would have that information to provide to you. But on the flip side, if the chatbot is giving you the information that operations would have given you, then somebody in operations has their time open to do more work on their day-to-day rather than trying to figure out the information to pass it on to you. I think people are scared because of that disruption of not knowing how to use this tool or how it works. Companies need to do due diligence to train their people on how this is actually beneficial to them or just how to use those tools so that they don't feel distress. Then they can leverage the information or how the tool can be used to their advantage.
Kumar: I like that a lot. The whole dock workers strike that's going on is just another symptom of the impact of technology on business processes. Certainly, it affects labor-intensive markets like shipyard unloading goods. You need humans to do that when machines start to take away those jobs and people get scared, to your point. But maybe there are other jobs that it also creates. That's something I haven't really even thought about.
But back to what you do. You're not helping shipyard workers or dock workers. You're helping businesses assess their current state and then put improvements in place. Can you share an example of how you've helped a company do that initial assessment? You go in there with your stethoscope and listen to the heartbeat of the company and say, "Here's what you need to do." Share an example of how that works.
Daniella: Thank you so much. With the disruption theme that you have, there was one where I had to do disruption between sales and operations. Operations was holding sales' hand every time they asked for a request. When I stepped in, I assessed what was happening, what was the dynamic. I noticed that there was a lot of time spent on the back and forth between those two teams. I always love using change management as a way to ease people swiftly, softly into what they should actually be doing to maximize their time.
I started telling operations, "This is as simple as you telling them a checklist - send me these five things. Only once you send me these five things will I move ahead and do your request." It took a lot for operations to get to that point of having to wait to make this whole request happen because they were still waiting for things to come through the door, but it was good because then it would put pressure on sales to send that information.
It disrupted sales a little bit because they were getting used to just starting with the first thing or the second thing from the request, but they had to push themselves to do their homework, do their due diligence. Eventually, once they started seeing how much faster requests were happening because operations was pushing and because sales was doing their homework, it made more sense. They were less "frenemies," if you will. They were more friendly to collaborate, communicate, and just move forward faster.
Kumar: That's great. It sounds like a really good outcome that you were able to get from that experience. It is disruptive when you can take something that takes weeks or months to get through a system and reduce that to days or hours. It can be amazing. People can be completely floored by the progress. I'm quite familiar with stories like that. It's about getting people together that work in different departments that typically don't collaborate. When they start to collaborate, the flow of information, the flow of knowledge speeds everything up, and it can be quite amazing.
Daniella: If you think about it too, once you have all of that information written down, it's so much easier for somebody new at the company to come in and get trained on that information rather than somebody coming in and your manager having to sit down with you for a whole week to give you all of this training. I'm sure that they want to see this person succeed, so they take the time. But if they have everything written down, then they just have to review it. If they have questions, that's when they can come to the managers.
There's so much tribal information - there's so much in people's brains that is not on paper. If somebody goes on vacation or transfers to another company, that information leaves with them. I'm always like, "Give me all of your brain - you are my brain trust, I need to pull that from you."
I've run into cases where I've had to pull information from people's brains who are going to get a promotion. It's their baby, so it's another type of disruption to allow them to get comfortable or process - allow them to give them the space to think about why this is good for them. Because if you give me all of your brain, I will be able to give that to somebody else who will do your work so that you can have better, bigger responsibilities in your life.
Kumar: That's a good point. When people get promoted, they end up doing, at least for some time, they end up doing their old job and their new job because what they have in their brain isn't well transferred.
Daniella: Exactly.
Kumar: The thing that you hear is KT sessions, knowledge transfer sessions. Some of that is still needed, but having something written, some documentation, can be very helpful. I was talking to a business owner who used to work for Disney. He was one of my guests on the show a couple months ago. At Disney, everything has a process, and it's all written down. Which is why when you go to a Disney resort, the experience that you get is always great. Not just good, but great. That's because everyone understands what's expected of them when they're greeting guests, when they're serving guests, when they're in a show. They all know exactly what they have to do. Everyone's role is well-defined, so they have the manual.
If there are changes that need to be made, he said they had something called plussing meetings. They got together as a team and tried to plus the process, make it better, add to it. They would take the process, whatever it was, and look for ways to make it fine-tuned and make it a little bit better. He's telling me all this because he's now a business coach, and this is what he helps his clients with - to document their processes. Certainly, what I do with my clients, and it sounds like you're doing the same thing, is to help them not only understand the process that exists, the current state, but also to document it and make it better and then document it.
Daniella: That makes me think about something too. I bet that behind building the process and showing that to the employees, they're doing training and enablement, because you can have all the documents you want, you can have all the processes that you want, but if you don't go back to train your people, enable your people to have governance really on it, then people are going to forget. It's like exercising a muscle. You're getting reinforcement on something that you already know, but the next time you hear it again, you will learn something new and learn something that you already knew a little bit better. I think that is key when it comes to understanding - if I already understand this so well, then that's when we can do the plussing of the processes.
For me, there are four pillars that I always use: resources, knowledge management, governance, and metrics and monitoring. This is very in tandem with the example that you were telling me. Number one, you have to have those resources, but without the resources and knowledge management - knowledge management is essentially who's your audience, who are you sending the message to. You can have those two hand in hand. Again, they're pillars. If you don't have one, then the whole thing breaks.
With governance, as we were saying, you can have all the documentation or the resources that you want. You can have all the knowledge management, but if you don't do the governance, the papers are just getting dust on them. So you have to come back around and build a cadence. It depends on the type of process. If it's really complex, maybe every few months. If it's not as complex, then once a year or just twice a year.
Then you have metrics and monitoring. The more you work from pillar one to pillar three, and you keep doing that cadence, then that's when the plus comes. You can now finally do the metrics and the monitoring and understand how many people are impacted, how many times a process is being executed in a year, how many roles or handoffs you have in between. All to equate to how many people are being affected in that one process for the year. Once you do calculations, you will find that you're either doing a great job and following things along, or you will realize how much time you're not using well. It's a lot of having the intention of each of those things.
Kumar: Let me shut my shade here since the sun is creeping in. It's interesting - of the four pillars you mentioned, can you elaborate? When you say resources, what do you mean by resources?
Daniella: By resources, I just mean documents. The reason why I started using the word resources was because the more business process management I do, people think that BPM - I'll just call it BPM from here on out - it's all about documentation, and it hurts my heart because it's not. It's so much more than that. It's like what I was telling you - the key to a company's success is not its individual pieces but how they are connected. It is the four pillars. It is looking at businesses from the outside in. It is being able to understand the operations of your business, the flow, how people are connected, the roles and responsibilities. Is that understood?
But in order to do that, you have to have your resources - your documents, everything written down, or a map in order to understand how your business works, because once you map it or document it, then it's easier to have a clear understanding of what you can then do in the future.
Kumar: I'm totally tracking with you. You may use different words and different terms, but I do a lot of the same thing. I call it value stream mapping, and it's mapping the flow of value through a process. Of course, you have to understand what the process is and what the steps are and who the people are, what systems they use, how they are using it. At the conclusion of this process, you can start to understand where the bottlenecks are and where improvements can be made and where documentation needs to be created.
Daniella: You can think about it in another way, too. I have an acronym that helps me put it into perspective - the acronym is FLOW. I was thinking one day about what's the best way to think of a business that is operationally smooth. FLOW just came to mind. This really is the formulation of clear processes where you take training into account - how often are you training your people? And then lowering redundancies - the more you lower those redundancies, the more efficiencies and optimization you're able to understand and see. Optimizing the efficiency over inflow - just being able to understand how you can maximize that timing with what you're doing. And finally, workplace unity - once you do all of this flow and your pillars, I see that there's so much collaboration, there's so much communication, the teams start working together.
I think that that's almost the most important part of everything because it always goes back to people. It always goes back to humans. The more you tend to them, the more you train them, and the more collaboration there is, then that is where more redundancies are lowered and the efficiencies are increased. So I think about it sometimes as a flow perspective too because it just makes sense.
Kumar: Can you repeat what the acronym stands for again?
Daniella: FLOW. F is for formulating clearly in processes. Then we have L which is for lowering redundancy. Then we have O for optimizing efficiency, and W is for workplace unity, which at the end of the day is all about collaboration. I needed W, but it's really collaboration.
Kumar: That's okay. Flock wouldn't flow as well, right?
Daniella: Exactly.
Kumar: Flow is also something - I mean, it's not an acronym - it's just flow. How do you flow value through your company? And so that resonates quite well with me. We have time for maybe one more question and then anything I didn't ask, you can talk about. Being that this theme is around disruption, what are some of the biggest challenges companies face when trying to implement these process changes? Biggest challenges and how do you help them overcome them?
Daniella: This is a great question. The first thing that comes to mind is they're being reactive because the nature of the business is asking for it. So I always say, let me be reactive so you can be proactive. The faster that you implement the tool, the slower that your employees or workers are going to understand how to use it, but because the need is so immediate and the tool is going to help speed things up - you have to help your people understand while you're implementing it. Who's going to use it? There are so many different roles. So everybody has to have those clear roles and responsibilities.
I think that's where there's a lot of miscommunication, for lack of a better word. It is so important to be able to say, "I want to implement this system." Again, let me write my current state processes so that when I do implement a new tool or I want to go into the most updated version of this tool, then you can look at what you already have and easily start transferring that information or the knowledge management piece so that when you're going to train or onboard your people, it's just more smooth or have that flow that we talked about.
Kumar: Things are changing all the time, rapidly changing. The pandemic was a huge change for so many companies. They had to evolve and adapt to everything shutting down. And then of course you have AI that's been a pretty disruptive change. What would you say are the key skills that professionals need to develop to stay relevant in this era of rapid change and disruption?
Daniella: There are so many tools. First of all, I know it can be tool fatigue, but I would say start with a few tools, learn the basics of each one. There are AI tools where it's like you're talking to a person or there are AI tools that do videos for you or say things for you. We have the chatbots. There are so many of them. I would say if you learn the basics of one, that's good because then you'll have a repertoire of information that when you really need something, then you can say, "I want to be an expert on this" or "I want to learn a little bit more about this so you can help me here." But you'll at least have a baseline understanding of what you can use.
Soft skills here are so important just because the more we talk about technology, the more we forget we're humans. I would say managing your expectations - there's a quote, I can't remember who said it, but it's all about managing expectations so you don't have to manage your emotions later on. That's a good soft skill to have and understand as we start using technology because it's moving fast, like jumping on the train because it's going.
And then, I don't know if you've read this book, but "Atomic Habits" - don't think about having something to the point that it is perfect. It's always about progress. One takeaway that I took from that was the one percent that you do every day compounds into that progress. I'm always thinking it's progress, not perfection. Think about that one percent that you can do every day. And I think once you put that concept into a tool, that's when you can really start seeing the compounding effects or the learnings that you can put into the skills.
Kumar: There are so many things that we are aligned on. You just use different language than I do. The whole continuous improvement in the agile and lean community, we call it Kaizen. Kaizen is small improvements over time yield huge outcomes or huge impacts. And so you put it in a different way, the one percent improvement every day, over time, it can grow to a lot. It's like the compounding effect of interest, the interest you earn on a bank account. Although one percent interest isn't all that much.
Daniella: It's the concept.
Kumar: That's the concept. What have I not asked you that you would like to say about process improvement or change management, the pillars that you talked about, or maybe just about yourself? How can people connect with you or learn from you? The floor is yours.
Daniella: Thank you so much. I think one important piece to take here is using change management or a little bit of psychology in general to be able to maneuver through this world of technology is so important. Having a culture of collaboration now is so important. That's always something I keep in mind when I work with teams. When I'm showing them the big picture, the as-is or the current state of what they do now, I am taking each one little by little to explain to them. It's a simple concept I call "the process to the process" where you start with one role, then you move on to the second role, onto the third role and so on. But I want to give each of those roles the love that they need and deserve.
Once I have a full picture of the high level, then I can come back to them and show them, and then they can start putting themselves in each other's shoes. That's when the collaboration starts happening with not just the person from role to role, but also the interaction between the person and the tool. I think that's really something extremely important for companies in general to provide to their employees. If you have a change management department or a business process management department, they should always be talking to each other. Similarly, they should both be learning how to connect those two because that's what's going to help us have those efficiencies in the future.
Kumar: Really enjoyed this conversation. I have more questions. It's just I don't know that people would stay for a podcast that would last two hours. I'm sure I could talk to you for two hours about this stuff. So we'll have to have you back, come back on and we'll probe other aspects of business process management and change management.
Daniella: Thank you so much for having me. All the podcasts that you have, I recommend others to watch them too because it is very interesting what perspectives other people come with. Like you're saying, it's the same type of concept that you're wording in a different way. And sometimes it clicks with different types of messages that people say. So I do encourage everybody to go to your podcast and just listen.
Kumar: Thank you for that. Language is important, and people - the language may not work in every situation. And what I'm learning through these podcasts is different ways to express the same thing that people use. So it's really helping me. You've helped me. So I thank you.
Daniella: Thank you for asking me the questions.
Kumar: Of course. Well, stay tuned. Keep coming back to the show. This has been a wonderful interview with Daniella. And I'm hoping that we can get you back on in the future. We'll see. But thanks for watching and see you next time.
Daniella: Thank you.
