My experience with certain large and well known organisations that handle finance has piqued my interest in Business Process Management, I am no expert, but I certainly wish to get involved in this.
First strike
My angst was this - for one organisation I sent regular charity donations and they in turn sent regular cds and newsletters each month, as some stage this exchange had a hiccup when I renewed this for another year and the cds & newsletters stopped.
What when wrong? I went online to try and retrieve my account which I had previously accessed to see the history of donations - the website had changed and I wasn’t able to access the account. I send an email from the site - no response.
I called and spent hours to try and alert the organisation about the situation where funds were leaving and no acknowledgement of received funds, the account couldn’t be traced.
Second strike
I had set up my ISA a couple of years back and as I signed the declaration for the next year, a letter was sent stating that I hadn’t signed the declaration; I signed the declaration form and sent it.
This happened 3 times - I went to the bank and physically handed this in, 2- 3 months later, they write back saying we haven’t received your declaration. Exasperated I call and explain - its déjà vu; their response - go through the process again.
This time - I decide to write a strongly worded letter and send this by registered delivery and guess what- still no response.
Consumer power
With the charitable organisation, I decide to take a drastic action. I spoke with my card company who gave me a few solutions to alert the organisation by sending a notice about the funds being taken - this doesn’t work. Eventually my card was declared “fraudulently” used –my old card is cancelled - so now they get nothing.
With my ISA I decided to transfer to another bank that would provide clear responses to requests and an easy renewal process.
How do you solve the problem that’s...?
These are large organisations - with global reach and are in no way small players with very little resources.
What happened in both cases is this; having a period of renewal and suddenly we were out of sync.
Each of these organisations had a synchronised
1. Registration
2. Payment / response
3. Year end closure
What they didn’t have was how to close the loop with the renewal process
In the first case the old account was completely lost.
In the second case it was the paper trail that didn’t interact with the software trail.
Common Solutions
How does this relate to Testing? Its simple don’t assume all your business scenarios are all set up and the loop closed.
- First solution is documenting current processes; this means the client and team know the processes that the client has.
- Next check that all your processes are joined up and have clear terminus OR join with current mainstream (happy) process.
Testing the business scenarios now become important to ensure that a paper trail intersecting a software system should be thoroughly checked to ensure this works, an example of where manual systems’ interacting with software systems is Terminal 5 . This is a clear indication of what can go wrong with large organisations where new systems were not in sync with its own "flow".
- Separate manual system work flow from software system work flow; do not assume they are running at the same rate. Keep the rates to hand when testing to know where the intersections occur and compare input - output rates to avoid backlogs.
- Run simulations for completed systems flow to see how your system would function when live.
Synchronised Size
Your clients will need to think of their businesses even when large - as being flexible, agile, and sensitive - to any change even one customer can’t be ignored.
To become personable - growth seems to make organisations behave like a Goliath – slow, insensitive to change which leads to low trust.
In Sound of Music - Maria and the Captain dance the Ländler - a complex folk dance.
Apply the same techniques - be synchronised (1, 2), sensitive (4) and effective (3).