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The strange and magical workflow

August 20, 2008
I created a workflow training program recently for a manufacturer who wanted their salespeople to understand the competitive advantage and extra value provided by workflow automation. At first glance this objective sounds fairly straight forward – but it is actually much harder then you might expect. 

One of the challenges is trying to explain what a “typical” or “average” workflow looks like. Why? Because there is no “typical” or “average” workflow.

Believe it or not every company has a different workflow. Some are closer to an 1980’s analog workflow while others are closer to a present day digital / hybrid workflow.  So the first challenge is to explain several different generations of workflow just to start to understand the different possible tools and issues.

Another challenge is trying to describe each of the analog and digital steps and potential issues such as bottlenecks, rework, and pain point  which comes across as strange philosophical issues.

In addition, simply describing the features and functions of new workflow products does not express the value of the an automated or streamlined workflow.

In the beginning of the class I asked what people thought workflow meant and many explained that it is this strange, almost magical process where you put a tissue into a hat tap it twice with a magic wand, and out pops the rabbit. Of course in this metaphor the tissue is the job jacket, the magic wand are the prepress staff and the rabbit is metal plates or pages from a digital press. And I was not sure if I could compete with the pull the rabbit out of a hat definition of workflow – because that is the best description I ever heard ☺

Posted by Howie Fenton on August 20, 2008 | Comments (0)