In the past year I’ve heard increased chatter about the need for improved facilitation skills in the BPM arena including at the November New York BrainStorm BPM Conference where facilitation skills were highlighted as a necessary competency of Business Analysts¹. So what are these facilitation skills everyone is talking about?

What is Facilitation?

Simply put, facilitation is a structured way of helping teams think, discuss, and make decisions in order to achieve their desired goals. And, like any other discipline, it requires a specialized skill set.  The larger or more complex the situation, the more honed the skills of the facilitator need to be.

Erik Weihenmayer is an acrobatic skydiver, long distance biker, marathon runner, skier, mountaineer, ice climber, and rock climber. Erik graduated from Weston High School in Connecticut in 1987. As the school’s wrestling captain, he represented the state in National Freestyle Wrestling Championships. In 1991, he graduated from Boston College, and in the same year, he trekked in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan.

Two problems frequently encountered in planning for new product development are what I call the “depth problem” and the “breadth problem”. In my article “First Things First”, I talked about the depth problem – basically failing to spend time and resources establishing what to make or implement (the right concept) before committing to planning how to make it.

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard from OMG has a lot to recommend it, but it’s not perfect. Since late February of this year, I’ve been doing BPMN training, and through that I have come to appreciate the subtle power of the notation and how it maps – or sometimes not – to the way real business analysts and architects want to model their processes.

The move to SOA and BPM means that application development can be more modular. But data is the essential foundation. BPMInstitute.org: You are now out on your own. What does BizThink do? Fletcher: We have a unique offering which involves process redesign and SOA and...