Part1: Case Management white paper – Extract No. 1

Michael White, 23 July 2009

As promised, here’s the second extract from our white paper “Case Management – combining process with knowledge”.  Case management describes how knowledge-centric processes are coordinated.  In this extract we describe the typical characteristics of Case Management. You can download the full white paper from http://www.singularity.co.uk/case-management-whitepaper.lit.  You can also check out our paper on Case Management on BPTrends at http://www.bptrends.com/resources_publications.cfm?publicationtypeID=DFC61D66-1031-D522-3EBDAB1F65A451AA , and we also have a chapter on Case Management in the Public Sector in this year’s BPM Handbook, available at http://www.futstrat.com/books/handbook09.php.  As always, we’d like your constructive feedback on the article and white paper and we’re happy to take any questions.

Case management scenarios share a lot of common characteristics.  Case workers need to manage a complex set of steps from the start of a case through to its completion, usually involving interaction with others in their organization and with external agencies, and requiring the generation of correspondence, documents and records.  The key characteristics of case management include:

• Knowledge-intensive: Typically case management processes require the intervention of skilled and knowledgeable personnel.  Staff acquire their knowledge through their experience of working on similar cases and through collaboration with more experienced colleagues, becoming thoroughly familiar with the tacit and explicit rules governing how cases should be managed.  These members of staff have to deal with issues that can be ambiguous and uncertain and that require judgment and creativity.  Managing knowledge so it stays within the organization and is passed quickly to new members of staff is a challenge.
• Variability: While a particular type of case will share a general structure (e.g. handling benefits applications), it is not possible to predetermine the path that a particular instance of a case will take[see note 1].  A case can change in unpredictable, dynamic and ad-hoc ways as it is progressed through an organization. Certain elements may be fixed (e.g. the end-to-end duration for completing a case may be set to 18 months, or a fixed budget may be allocated to each case) but there can be considerable variation in how steps are executed, based on the particular circumstances of the case.
• Long running: cases can run for months or years, and are generally much longer running than the shorter interaction cycles handled by standard customer relationship management (CRM) systems.  Because a case is long running, it changes hands over time, different people work on different aspects and no single individual has an accurate view of the case as a whole.  This drives the need for a supporting case management system that can provide a single consolidated picture of the case.
• Information Complexity:  Case management almost always entails the collection and presentation of a diverse set of documents and records.  Emails, meeting notes, case documents and correspondence related to a case must be easily accessible to the appropriate case worker at the right time.  This is often difficult for case managers to organize and manage efficiently, with the danger that an important record, note or file will be unavailable, lost or overlooked when it is needed.  Retrieving the correct information required at a particular decision point usually depends on the knowledge of the case worker and an adequate physical filing system.
• Collaboration and coordination: case workers usually need to co-ordinate interviews and meetings among interested parties e.g. scheduling an interview with an applicant, with other staff in the organization, with legal representatives. Many cases require a team-based approach, with different specialists working on different aspects of a case or acting as consultants to their colleagues.  These team members need to be able to access case information and discuss it with each other.  Collaboration is particularly important in knowledge-based case management because workers rely on each other’s advice and experience when making decisions on a case.
• Multiple Participants, Multiple Roles: There are often a range of involved parties, either directly or indirectly related to a case, who play different roles during the lifetime of the case – e.g. applicant, witness, claimant, injured party, appellant etc.  There can also be a large range of staff roles required to complete a case end-to-end.  And case workers can fulfill different roles in different types of cases.
• Cases can be interrelated: the outcome of separate cases may have an impact on each other.  For example, an application for citizenship by an individual may be affected by the success or failure of an application by a spouse or immediate relative.   Cases can be explicitly linked or they may be linked by inference and conducted with this inferred link in mind.
• Critical nature of timescales: while cases may have great variability in how they are completed, very often there are inflexible requirements for end-to-end timescales, driven by legislation or Service Level Agreements.
• External events affect cases: external, out-of-band events and intervention can change the state of a running case e.g. a phone call from a lawyer or the unscheduled arrival of compliance documentation.
• Difficulty in Gaining Visibility of Case Progress: this is a common characteristic of case management as it is implemented today, although it is not an inherent characteristic.  While case workers may have a good understanding of how they are progressing individual cases, it is often difficult to monitor progress when work has been passed to colleagues within their own unit or to an external department.  At a higher level, managers usually have poor visibility of how long it takes to progress a case on average, how much a case costs to process, and what the expected completion time is for a particular case.  It may also be difficult to obtain information on which cases are stalled waiting for an external communication and which steps in a case are repeatedly causing bottlenecks. The result is that processing of cases is often serialized, because to run them in parallel, while more efficient, is just too difficult for many organizations to manage.
• Strong reporting requirements: There is usually a significant requirement to report on and analyze information derived from case handling, both at operational and management levels, for example workload analysis of cases by stage, by individual and by department and case performance versus target.  Managers want gain insight into operational performance and quickly identify exceptions.
• History: every action performed, every decision taken and every piece of correspondence received has to be tracked, not just for audit purposes, but also to provide guidance for future similar cases.  Case workers need access to this history when making decisions, while auditors need the history to ensure policies are being adhered to.  The case history is the organization’s defense mechanism against any allegations of failure to perform, particularly in cases which have high cost or personal impact.
• Security:  there is a requirement to provide fine-grained control over who has access to particular information and functionality.  In certain environments, these security requirements assume particular significance e.g. policing, health care and child protection.
• Isolated pockets of automation: this is a characteristic of case management as it is generally implemented today, rather than an inherent characteristic.  Case management is usually only partly automated and there is disjoint between those pockets of automation.  Legacy systems automate slices of the processes, but the end-to-end management of a case still relies too heavily on paper documentation, physical folders, spreadsheets and email. 

While this list of characteristics is not exhaustive, it captures the essential aspects of managing cases.  But what are the practical implications?  Why should people care about the characteristics of cases or the issues raised when trying to automate them? 

In the next extract, we’re going to look at why Case Management is so important to so many organizations today and why it’s going to become more important to more of us in future.

It’s Tour de France season – which is an exciting time of the year for a man with calves and varicose veins like mine.  Road cycling remains a minority interest in the British Isles but, perhaps stimulated by the UK’s stunning success in track cycling in Beijing, I’m seeing unusually high levels of awareness and enthusiasm for the TdF this year.  This is good – it means I may not have to move to Belgium (although their beer is a compelling proposition).

What has this to do with BPM?  Bear with me…  one of the unusual aspects of this year’s tour is that the Astana team (banned last year because of a historical association with performance enhancing substances) is back, and with at least three cyclists capable of winning the Tour.  Lance Armstrong has won seven times, and looks sharp enough to make it eight. Alberto Contador was the 2007 winner, and, but for the ban, might be shooting for 3 titles, and Levi Leipheimer has been a top flight rider for several years with a wicked time-trial performance. Most teams would be happy to have any one of them, but here they all are simultaneously trying to win the tournament themselves, ensure that someone from the Astana team wins the individual event, and ensure that Astana wins the team trophy.

The press are falling over themselves trying to stoke up the internal rivalry and generate as much excitement, controversy and debate as they can.  But, hang on, isn’t this just another day at the office? In any organisation today people are balancing their own personal craving for success, their desire to be a team player, and their (enlightened self-interested) wish to see the team/dept/company succeed. It’s not an odd thing – it’s the norm, or at least it should be unless you’ve been crazy enough to hire one good guy and a bunch of lazy and indifferent people.

How far should the business enable or encourage this complicated dynamic? Is it actually a really positive thing rather than a problem? Every business should want the strongest team they can afford; but this only makes sense if they can actually unleash the full potential of those people, and reward them accordingly,  and that requires certain criteria to be fulfilled:

            1. Each player’s overall contribution is fully recognised and rewarded
            2. Each player’s particular strengths are identified, exploited and celebrated
            3. If there a single outstanding performer, it should be possible to identify them quickly and align
                the whole team behind them

Ok, I asked for your forbearance… for many of you, this team dynamic is perhaps not an issue – you work in small fluid teams and you have the chance to shine, or support,  with visibility. But this is not so for the vast majority of people in work today. Their issue closure rate, their customer satisfaction rating, their low defect rates, their creativity, are all invisible, uncelebrated, unsupported.  Not only are we not encouraging healthy competition between them to be the best individual and/or team performers, we may well be encouraging them to coast.  So this is a plea for Business Activity Monitoring – knowing enough about your teams and who is delivering value and in what ways so that you can do what Astana need to do today.   Establishing and enabling processes is good – but make sure as you do it, that you’re getting the data back out of the processes , not just about the overall result, but also about the Contadors, Armstrongs and Leipheimers, to drive up the performance of the entire team… er business.

About the Author: Paul Moorhead is the Product Manager at Singularity.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus starts with the statement “The world is everything that is the case”. I’ve never got far past that sentence, being diverted into pondering whether it’s a synthetic or analytic a-priori truth and crashing my operating system. Anyway, it serves to highlight the difficulty with the meaning of the word “case”.

Read the rest of this entry »

I bumped into an old friend recently and we updated each on other on family health and the like, in the course of which he told me about his son’s approach to exams. His son subscribes to the “Law of Forced Efficiency“. Some of you may remember the original radio shows wherein one of the plot devices was an “artificially induced crisis mode” used by the Lintilla clones any time they had something that they needed to get done. I’ve also observed (and this will get me into trouble) that some cultures in Europe seem to like crises more than others, and prefer to let them arise and then react energetically, rather than proactively head them off. I’ll drop a hint and say that those cultures are in the Mediterranean (must be the heat).

Read the rest of this entry »

The latest publicity binge around James Bond rings a bit hollow with me. Maybe its age, maybe it’s the actor, or maybe it’s just me, but from my perspective James Bond peaked early with Goldfinger. It had the best Bond actor - Sean Connery, the best plot - Goldfingers ‘operation grand slam’ to break into Fort Knox, but not to steal any gold. Instead he planned to blow up an atomic bomb and make the gold radioactive. (Of course James Bond knew for exactly how long it would remain radio active, and how much Goldfinger’s gold would increase in value as a result). It had the best car, the best bond girl (Honor Blackman) and the best bond baddie - Oddjob with his deadly hat.

Read the rest of this entry »

An alternative title could be ’spend a little more to save a lot of money’, and it’s very relevant now when everyone’s personal and business budget is being squeezed. It’s a piece of advice my father gave me about buying tools - don’t buy the cheapest offerings which are made to look like the quality brands, buy the real thing - and in my case I take it a little further and prefer to buy my quality tools at a specialist ‘mom and pop store’. It might cost a few more dollars, but that’s cheap compared to the advice you get in choosing the exact tool for the job, and more importantly the long-term relationship you build up with the store owner.

Read the rest of this entry »

It must take a long time to make a Universe. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, you might think it takes a long time to powerwash the front drive, but that’s just *peanuts* to making a Universe. Douglas managed it with his Hitchhiker Universe, and its now difficult to imagine there was a time when we did not know that Vogon poetry was among the worst in the Universe, that the way to travel vast interstellar distances is by using an infinite improbability drive, and that the answer to the untimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always been a big fan of end of the world fiction. I think it goes back to me reading ‘War of the Worlds’ when I was a kid, and seeing an early BBC adaptation of ‘Day of the Triffids’. It was repeated on a cable channel a few months ago, and although the walking plants looked exactly like large wood and rubber models, some of the images of deserted London still struck home. It seems every disaster movie now has to have that iconic image of an empty city, abandoned transport and a fluttering newspaper with the revealing headline.

Read the rest of this entry »

During a recent car journey my wife posed me the following question

- ‘If you were to go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?’
It’s a great question - (especially after passing on future lottery numbers and racing tips had been out ruled), what personal decisions would you change, and more interestingly, what would then be the ripple effect on the rest of your life?

Read the rest of this entry »

I was exposed to the Singularity Process Platform for the first time back in 2004, while working on a project for one of the world’s largest banks. As with most BPM projects, we were implementing a solution that coordinated both system-to-system processes, system-to-human processes and human-to-human processes. For any of the processes that required human interaction, you obviously had to provide some way for humans to interface – generally through web-based screens.

Read the rest of this entry »