This blog started out (over two years ago) with a desire to share something that I did at work (that I thought was cool) with the world (even if the world wasn’t really listening). This entry is another one of those.

I find that, at a given meeting (presentation, demo etc.), the participants all have a finite amount of energy (imagination, patience etc.) that they are willing to put into the purpose of the meeting. For a meeting that I have an interest in the purpose of, the more I can do to prevent wasted energy, the better things will be.

My first suggestion is pretty simple: Press F11! If people are watching your screen (via a projector etc.), make sure that everything that is on your screen is what you want them to be thinking about. If you want them to idly review your bookmarks, ponder the contents of your background tabs/applications or contemplate switching to your browser of choice then that’s fine (it’s not fine). Otherwise, it’s usually pretty straightforward to hide away distractions and save some of that imagination/patience/energy for something more important.

My second suggestion is (if you use IBM BPM) to keep an improved Default Human Service in your toolkit so that you can build better PoCs by minimising the amount of imagination that’s required to imagine your PoC as the real thing.

Here’s mine (you can get it, along with some other cool stuff, at https://github.com/garyjoy/enjoyingbpm)...

The improvements are:

Nothing new in the Diagram.

Added some (optional) Input and Output Variables (and a couple of Private Variables).

The Narrative is front-and-centre and there are Tabs for Decisions and Comments.

Using my improved Default Human Service you can build end-to-end process flows with working decisions, instructions and user-contributed data (all from a single process diagram).

Here’s a short video of the user experience and some screenshots of the process diagram:

When using the improved Default Human Service you should make sure you have a meaningful Task Subject and also a Narrative that will explain to the user what you want them to do (it will handle carriage returns in the text).

Every time you use the improved Default Human Service you should pass in a list of Strings that represent the options for the user. It will return the selected one (that you can use in Decision Gateways).

Just beneath the surface of the improved Default Human Service is a Comments Coach View that is pretty cool in it’s own right. You can just drop it into a Coach and you will get responsive access to the out-the-box comments in all of your Coaches.

One final suggestion: don’t build disposable PoCs. If I were king your PoC would be the Sprint 1 deliverable and at the end of Sprint 2 it would do something extra that your customers think is awesome.