The Usual Suspects - Nine Twitter business tools

If you are developing your contacts then these are some of the tools we use that you may also find useful!

  1. Follow Cost: This tool will tell you how much effort it takes to follow someone.
  2. Just Tweet It: Find Tweeple, tools, Twitter bots and more through this directory.
  3. TwitDir: Search people and explore categories including top followers and updaters.
  4. Twubble: Expand your Twitter bubble, picking out new people to follow.
  5. Who Should I Follow?: You can get good recommendations for Tweeps to follow.
  6. WhoFollowsWhom: Put up to 5 friends and see who they have in common.
  7. Twellow: Find Twitter users in a specific industry using this service.
  8. We Follow: We Follow is a new type of list, helping you find targeted followers.
  9. Twitter Local: You can see tweets from Twitter users in a specific location.
If you have a useful tool let us know news@bpgroup.org

Lucky 7 - Finding out what is going on - guess what my number one is?

With these tools, you gather information for market research, blog posts, or simple curiosity.

  1. @myflightinfo: Use @myflightinfo to stay updated on your flight’s status.
  2. Tweetbeep: Setup alerts that will help you keep track of specific keywords.
  3. TweetNews: TweetNews ranks stories based on the amount of related tweets.
  4. TwitterBuzz: TwitterBuzz will tell you what’s being linked to the most on Twitter.
  5. Tweetscan: Set up to make sure you don’t miss @replies, and to get search queries.
  6. Twitterverse: Check out archived timelines and tweets through Twitterverse.
  7. Monitter: Get real time keyword monitoring on Twitter from Monitter.

Announcement from BP Group (August 17) Topics Include: Latest Discussions; Metrics; Connecting to Group Leaders; Subgroups, Conference

Group Metrics:
Members: 2,501 (up 345 from last month)
Discussions: 291 (Each Month)
Subgroups: 5

HEADLINE:
It took the original BP Group 10 years to get to 2,500 Members. Here on LinkedIn we have 2,500 members after 10 months. Thanks to all - power to our elbows!
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Subgroups:
There's five now - connect here - http://bit.ly/wg0OA
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Articles/Discussions underway this week
- more than 291 discussions underway!

Dick Lee - You can't manage what you can't measure (or can you?)
http://bit.ly/1JhU53

John Corr - Can you really design significant cost reductions (15-25% implementable in 30-60 days) to service processes with just Post-Its?
http://bit.ly/wg0OA

Carlos Macias - Mapping business activity process with IT Application is a good way to mitigate IT and business risks, and cut costs?
http://bit.ly/xCtmK

Steve Towers - Twitter tools for Active business users
http://bit.ly/aRnVx

Fast links to key BPM resources - http://bit.ly/Hd1pB
Please visit http://successfuloutcomes.blogspot.com for indepth articles.


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Recognition as a professional is increasingly important. Be part of that advantage by becoming a Business Process Professional (7,000 in 4 years)
Visit http://www.bp2009.com for the program or learn more at http://www.businessprocessprofessional.com

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Recommended Conference (January 2010) - http://bit.ly/w2JWW
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Warm Regards,

Steven Towers, Process Evangelist, Founder BP Group
http://www.linkedin.com/in/SteveTowers
303-800-0924

Skype: chessfiend2
steve.towers@bpgroup.org
http://www.stevetowers.com

Top Eight Twitter Information Analysis tools

Use these tools to better understand and optimise your tweeting

  1. Twitter Analyzer: Easy to use and understand interface, very cool stats.
  2. Tweetwasters: Find out how much time you and other users waste on Twitter.
  3. Twitalyzer: Rate your Tweeting influence and see areas to improve.
  4. Twitterholic: Check out top Twitter users and find out your stats on Twitterholic.
  5. TweetStats: TweetStats offers a graphical analysis of your Twitter stats.
  6. Twitter Friends: Measuring your Twitter conversations using Twitter Friends.
  7. Twinfluence: Shows detail of influence based on reach, velocity, and social capital.
  8. Tweet-Rank: Discover which of your tweets earned new or lost followers.
Next we'll feature a bunch of tools that improve our personal productivity ;-)

Are You Prepared to Practice 3-Dimensional Process?

Dick Lee, Principal, High-Yield Methods
dlee@h-ym.com; www.h-ym.com

Recently I posed the title question in the BP Group on Linkedin (http://bit.ly/3Lhw7).

The comments from a group of process professionals, largely unknown to each other prior, “struck oil” by drilling down deep and hitting core issues facing process today. But first, the premise behind the question.

Two circumstances are forcing changes in how we practice process. First, business has largely depleted the pool of significant process improvement opportunities in manufacturing. Second, the vast majority of employees in developed economies (over 90% in the U.S.) work outside of manufacturing, most in office and service (O/S) settings. Hence, the rapid rise in the importance of long-neglected O/S process.

For a number of reasons, fully capitalizing on O/S process improvement opportunities requires different skill sets and tools than for manufacturing. One example–O/S settings include many decision-making knowledge-workers, who can’t (and won’t) be saddled with “fixed process” designed to minimize variances rather than support decision-making. Another–process has a much wider scope in the O/S than in manufacturing. Rather than deal with one primary independent dimension, “how” work is performed, O/S process has four: “how,” “what,” “who” and technology design. It’s a huge stretch for manufacturing approaches to touch these additional areas, and it’s but a tangential touch at that.

Bottom line, process professionals can’t just tweak traditional manufacturing process design methods and expect stellar O/S outcomes–a point underscored by both Six Sigma and Lean consistently underperforming in O/S settings. And to paraphrase my question, I was really asking readers: “Are you ready to move beyond Six Sigma and Lean and adopt new, O/S-specific process approaches, which not surprisingly are “outside-in” methods?

The answers are bi-polar.

The discussion thread revealed two discrete factions of process professionals:
1. The “movers,” anxious to explore to explore new O/S process.
2. The “stayers,” zealously protecting the value of their Six Sigma (especially) or Lean training.

This divide reflects what numerous other discussion threads on BP Group reveal. The latter group denies any shortcomings in their traditional approaches for addressing O/S process, responding to challenges by citing this or that add-on feature that makes their method O/S-ready. The harsh reality of so many underperforming or non-performing O/S implementations belies these claims, but some of these folks have their heels dug in deep.

However, the former, “movers” group makes many interesting points favoring moving past Six Sigma and Lean.
• Assessing EA (enterprise architecture) plays a key role in O/S process design
• Increasing employee empowerment is also factors in
• As does reducing managerial involvement (especially at the supervisor level)
• O/S process has to leave companies flexible and agile to quickly respond to customer and market changes
• Both Six Sigma and Lean are “technology challenged”
• Technology is not a “silver bullet,” but it “greases the rails”

This group makes many more points, almost all showing they’re chomping at the bit.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), this and other threads reveal a growing split in the process community between the “movers” and the “stayers”
– enough so that we may soon see a bifurcated process industry. Is that bad? And which way do you lean?

BPM and Performance Management

Keynote from Architecture World 2009 - Bangalore, India.

The Tip of the Process Iceberg

Most process improvement techniques focus on only a small portion of the improvement potential in every process… the tip of the iceberg if you will. How big is the opportunity resting out of our sight, hidden below the waterline of current practices?

Recent research by the BP Group suggests that 70 to 90 percent of the work people do comes directly from process Points of Failure and Causes of Work and this work is NOT part of the “job” for which these people were hired! Instead, this is non-value add work that takes away from people’s ability to do their job.

Does this sound familiar? Can you identify places where these Points of Failure and Causes of Work are distracting you from what you really want to be doing?

Are you required to fill out this form, check up on that order, or follow-up on those activities? Do you get tasked with finding the answer, knowing the rules, fighting that fire or explaining why you did this or that?

Fixing Effects (the tip of the iceberg) only gets us so far. To create real change in how efficiently we use our time requires us to focus on eliminating the Causes of Work (the rest of the iceberg). This is the first step we must take in aligning our businesses for success in the 21st Century.

More on the Causes of Work at http://bit.ly/VJN8V