Workshop for IT Architects,  Project Leaders,   
Consultants and Analysts

Intensive hands-on training on how to develop
your own framework for workflow product selection, and how to manage workflow projects

Learn how to identify which workflow products fit your needs from in-depth analysis and examples from leading products. Understand what are the key specificities of project management for workflow applications.

Course Leader: Martin Ader, author of the highly acclaimed Workflow Comparative Study

Learn how to:

Workshop Outline

Section 1 - Workflow Projects: Concepts and Methodologies

DESCRIPTION: This session introduces an analytical, structured approach to workflow product analysis, product  selection, and project management . The session introduces workflow terminology and techniques, creating a foundation of understanding for later sessions.

OBJECTIVES: T It is designed to create a firm understanding of the need for workflow applications requirements analysis, and increase awareness of the features required in workflow tools as well as specificities of workflow projects.
  • Positioning group technologies against information systems applications
  • Understanding workflow benefits.
  • Relative positions of BPR and workflow technologies.
  • A methodology for product selection.
  • An overview of the 12 selection criteria.
  • Positioning workflow inside the group technologies scope.
  • Understanding potential impacts of workflow compared to DM and groupware.
  • Selecting goals of a workflow application.
  • Ad-hoc, collaborative administrative and production application classes

Section 2 - Main Criteria for Production and Administrative Applications

DESCRIPTION: This session introduces attendees to the two major selection criteria for production workflow applications classes: procedure programming power, organization and dispatching, and activity programming power.

OBJECTIVES: Provide an understanding of various aspects of how a procedure can be defined and how rules can be established for automatic dispatching of activities to users according to organization in place. Understand what facilities can be provided for development of assisted activities. Relate each feature to possible usage and evaluate if it is really required.
  • Representation of sequence, alternative, parallelism, loop, multiple path
  • Variables definition representing the procedure context
  • Complexity management and re-use
  • Organization modeling, role, group, participant, authority
  • Administration, and substitution
  • Application Programmatic Interfaces
  • Multilingual support
  • Expression of pre and post conditions, path conditions, exceptions
  • Exception processing related to time management
  • Verification and simulation
  • Dispatching rules based upon an organization model
  • Management of deadlines, documents and folders, automatic activities
  • Events processing mechanisms, based upon time, and external events

Section 3 - Main Criteria for Ad-hoc and Collaborative Applications

DESCRIPTION: This session introduces attendees to the criteria that are essential for ad-hoc and collaborative applications: user agents, easy procedure definition, easy activity definition, and dynamic changes.

OBJECTIVES: Provide an in-depth review of those features that are required for effective ad-hoc and collaborative applications development.
  • Worklist handler important features: list, order, manage, and select activities.
  • History management, and graphical status views.
  • Late binding of subnetworks, late evaluation of dispatching rules.
  • Activity definition by scripting actions
  • Graphical procedure definition
  • Features supported by the workflow engine for simple procedure definition
  • Activity user agent features: view, manage, enter data, decide and control.
  • Dynamic procedure definition change capabilities
  • Activity definition through forms designers.
  • Libraries of activities and actions
  • Assisted rules and conditions definition

Section 4 - Criteria common to all application classes

DESCRIPTION: This session introduces attendees to the criteria that are important for all application classes: throughput rates, server operation, statistics, distribution mechanisms for a multiserver implementation, and work-from-home.

OBJECTIVES: Understand how those criteria may or may not be important depending upon application characteristics.
  •  
  • Typical requirements per application class, and typical products offerings.
  • Operation, recovery and restart, archiving, exception processing
  • Cooperation of several workflow engines, call and spawn remote procedures
  • Infrastructures: network, servers, workstations, development tools
  • Distributed servers architectures, their potential benefits
  • Logs, statistics, costs analysis, quality measurements
  • Home-work support: get work while working, off line batch mode, remote software update.

Section 5 - Workflow Project Management

DESCRIPTION: What are the key differences with a traditional IT project? The main phases of a Workflow Project; Infrastructure Project, Process analysis phase, Prototyping Phase, Development, Deployment.
OBJECTIVES: Give essentials of what is Workflow project management
  • Identifying projects goals
  • How to get management commitment
  • Process analysis with users
  • Process improvements
  • Prototyping with users involvement
  • Training methodologies
  • Deployment
  • Support and administration
  • Evaluation
  • Continuous Improvements
  • Supporting exceptions
  • Users groups

Section 6 - Workflow Engines Overview

DESCRIPTION: presentation of the compared features of collaborative,   ad-hoc, production and administrative  workflow engines.
  • Oracle Workflow (Oracle).
  • InConcert (Tibco)
  • SAP WebFlow
  • FlowMind (Akazi)
  • WebSphere MQ Workflow  (IBM)
  • W4 (W4).
  • iFlow (Fujitsu)
  • P8 BPM Suite  (Filenet)
  • COSA Workflow (COSA Solutions)
  • Staffware (Staffware)

Martin Ader has 16 years of in-depth experience in workflow research and development, competitive analysis, and consulting. He is author of the highly acclaimed Workflow Comparative Study. Mr. Ader set up and managed the Bull Workflow research team. In ten years his team built two successive prototypes of workflow distributed engines and produced the well-received FlowPATH Bull workflow product. The team was later transferred to Eastman Software (formerly Wang), where Ader became responsible for European Workflow Marketing. In 1996, he created his own consultancy firm, Workflow & Groupware Stratégies (W&GS). Ader was Wang Software representative at the WfMC technical committee. W&GS is a funding member of the WfMC. Ader also participates in the Workflow And Reengineering International Association (WARIA).