Sudden changes to the business landscape have disrupted customer experiences and operations for companies around the world.

It’s more challenging than ever to gain visibility into and understand processes, which is critical to the ability to respond quickly and make necessary changes.

Ensuring your processes operate optimally is vital, and there’s an urgent need to:  

• Optimize remote collaboration to better understand the current state of your business processes
• Determine how processes can be redesigned to better support your customers and build resiliency

Three common business process challenges

To make this happen, you need the active participation of the right stakeholders collaborating at the right time to model your business processes. This was never a small task, but it’s even more challenging now when most of the people you need are not in the same room, building, or city. As a result, organizations using traditional process modeling tools are commonly experiencing the following:

1. Difficulty keeping stakeholders engaged using virtual meetings
2. Miscommunication of process information and feedback
3. Problems staying focused on the “right step” during process review and “walking-through” validations

But don’t worry my fellow Process Ninjas, Process Playbacks can help! 

What is Process Playback? 

Process Playback is a feature within IBM Blueworks Live that allows business analysts to remotely walk stakeholders through a process, step-by-step. This helps facilitate a shared understanding, identify opportunities for improvement, and document any missing information. 

So, how can Process Playback help solve the challenges of a traditional modeling tool?

1. Difficulty keeping stakeholders engaged using virtual meetings: Process Playback provides a visual, dynamic walkthrough of process steps, making it easier for stakeholders to understand. It is actually fun—almost like a video game.
2. Miscommunication process information and feedback: You can display the documented properties for each activity (Participant, System, Inputs/Outputs, Problems, etc.) and add real-time comments alongside. This ensures the accuracy of the information and that nothing is left out. 
3. Problems staying focused on the “right step” during process review and “walking-through” validations: Processes are complicated, right? It is difficult to keep participants focused on “where you are” in the process during a discussion. Playbacks let you isolate particular parts of a process and choose the steps you want to highlight. This ensures your participants’ focus remains clear.

With the new enhancements of Process Playback, it’s even easier to collaborate with your stakeholders, retain visibility, and communicate within and across complex processes. For more information on the Process Playback feature, check out this demo video. You can also register for our Process Ninja webinar series to learn how to best use Process Playbacks and other IBM Blueworks Live best practices: