Discontinue of ProcessCanvas.com

Thanks for your interest in ProcessCanvas.com. I'm sorry to tell you that the ProcessCanvas.com cease it's operation since the end of November 2011.

If you have further interest about ProcessCanvas.com or the domain name, feel free to drop an e-mail message to limcheekin@vobject.com.

An Open Letter to ProcessCanvas.com Launch Subscribers

I had gone through an blog post titled "Startups: Don't just collect my email" by Phil Anderson few days ago, He write:

Collecting emails is a great way to get in touch with your potential users when you are ready to go. I've since put my email address in quite a few of these.  But I haven't heard back from a single one.  I know launching a startup takes time, but by not contacting people who are interested in your startup and keeping them up to date, I'm probably going to forget all about it.

Thanks Phil, your blog post reminded me I should update users of ProcessCanvas.com whose trusted us by sending their e-mail address to us. They are my valued subscribers, they should receive status updates of ProcessCanvas.com they deserved. I apologized as they didn't hear any updates from me.

I launched ProcessCanvas.com since mid of December 2010 as process wizard that allow user to create process definition of Activiti step by step. At current stage, ProcessCanvas is look like alternative development tool that allow developers or process analysts to create the BPMN XML file. But the end product of ProcessCanvas in my vision is not a development tool, it is online workflow builder that allow IT Consultant, Business Process Consultant, Subject Matter Experts, Small Business Owner, etc. to create workflow application that up and running in minutes.

You may ask "How is it so?", as you may unable to visualize how these dots connect, I will attempt to make a clearer picture here. When you look at the existing process wizard, what component was missing in order to build a complete workflow application? Yes, the form builder component. If you can design form visually in user task steps, the process wizard can deploy the BPMN XML file to Activiti process engine, and the workflow application (based on the BPMN XML file) is ready to go. Therefore, I kicked off the form builder plugin project early this year, and released 0.1 in the end of February. Also, quite a number of Grails plugins created as by-products of the ProcessCanvas.com and the form builder plugin.

Prior to release 0.1 of the form builder plugin, I realized few critical non-technical mistakes I made which slow down the development momentum of both ProcessCanvas.com and form builder plugin, I write about the following mistakes in a post of my personal blog titled "Crossing the Chasm in Me":

1. Invested too much time and effort to the product before knowing whether the product have market size that big enough to build a business on it.
   
2. Customers may not have the same problems that I faced. Even they faced the same problems, the problems may not pain enough until no choice they have to pay for the product to solve it. Over passionate about the solution without knowing it is real problem to paying customers is a problem by itself.
3. Do I know how to reach the targeted customers? Frankly speaking, I have no idea besides posting the release news and announcement to the BPM (Business Process Management) community and hanging there (Technical people is poor in marketing).

To fix my mistakes, I think ProcessCanvas.com need to find at least one vertical market which targeted customers can be reachable by an one-man startup (I preferred to call ProcessCanvas a project instead of product or startup as it doesn't have any paying customer at the moment). Sorry to inform you that I haven't found the vertical market, so I am unable to tell you when will I resume the development of ProcessCanvas.com.

For your information, 7 users subscribed to product launch of ProcessCanvas.com as per today. I included the link of this open letter in e-mail message written and sent to each of them.

Lastly, I'd love to hear your comments. If possible, I would love to arrange 20-30 minutes of your time to discuss about ProcessCanvas. I'm not selling anything, just looking for advice.

What is "Workflow"?

My friend asking me what am I doing recently, I replied "ProcessCanvas.com, kind of online workflow builder". Then, He ask the next question with doubtful face, "What is workflow?". I still remembered that the way I answered him was giving some use cases of workflow system instead of define it properly. How do you define "workflow" in layman terms, to people that never use (or never aware they are using) workflow system before?

Let's do a simple search for "what is workflow" in google to see how others defined it:

From Workflow Management Coalition (WFMC) and e-Workflow,

The automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant* to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules.
*participant = resource (human or machine)

From Wikipedia,

A workflow consists of a sequence of connected steps. It is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms. Workflow may be seen as any abstraction of real work, segregated in workshare, work split or other types of ordering.

From Whatis.com,

Workflow is a term used to describe the tasks, procedural steps, organizations or people involved, required input and output information, and tools needed for each step in a business process.

From Webopedia,

The defined series of tasks within an organization to produce a final outcome.

Given definitions above, I preferred Webopedia's definition due to it's simplicity and WFMC's definition due to it's comprehensiveness. However, Webopedia's definition is simple but incomplete and WFMC's definition is complete but may not understandable to a layman. Also, both definitions have one important item missing: time frame.

So, I will attempt to come out our definition for "workflow" by refer to definitions above. Let's break out the word "workflow" to "work" and "flow":

From google define:work,

• have an effect or outcome; often the one desired or expected.
• function: perform as expected when applied.
• proceed towards a goal or along a path or through an activity.

From google define:flow,

• move or progress freely as if in a stream.
• the motion characteristic of fluids (liquids or gases).
• the act of flowing or streaming; continuous progression.

We defines workflow as:

A defined series of tasks performed by workers or computerized systems within or across organization collaboratively to achieve specific business goals within a specified time frame.

What do you think about our definition of "workflow"? Do you have better way to define it?

What's Your Problem?

We took the initiative to bootstrap ProcessCanvas is to Scratch Our Own Itch. After using several enterprise workflow products, we experienced the following problems:

Problem 1: Business User or Customer has hard time to understand and visualize process diagram
Existing diagram-based process modeling tool is to facilitate communication and business process study between business/process analyst, customer (process owner) and other stakeholders. However, in our experience, it doesn't achieve this objective very well as our customer and other stakeholders preferred screenshots or screenflows over process diagram.


Problem 2: Existing workflow tool is not user-friendly
Business Analyst and Subject Matters Expert need to know process notation such as BPMN to create an appropriate process model. In our experience, most Business Analysts and Subject Matters Experts do not know how to use the process modeling tool. Also, It is still too painful and taking days to translate the process model with simple and intermediate level of complexity such as the Vacation Request process, to a working process application.

Problem 3: It take too much time and effort to produce reports
Each process has set of reports need to build such as daily, weekly, monthly and annual progress status report.


Do you think the problems above worth solving? Are we alone, do you facing similar problems and how do you deal with it today? Have you run into any other problems we didn’t mentioned?

We wish to hear from you soon!

Thanks for reading. Happy New Year 2011 and Happy Holidays!

ProcessCanvas.com go online!

We would like to announce the ProcessCanvas preview released!

ProcessCanvas is an online workflow builder that helps anyone create customized collaborative application without writing single line of code (We are not really reach there yet, that's the reason it is preview release).

Together with the release news, we have make the following introductory screencasts to show you how to create workflow application by using ProcessCanvas and Grails Activiti Plugin (Click on any image below to watch the corresponding screencast):

 

 

Have fun!