Book puff!

I’ve received the copy for my book jacket from the publishers, and I love it. (I am tempted to keep this around at work, where I am working on a project involving the very stuff I wrote about, in case I need to convince anyone.) Here’s my favorite bit, from the inside flap:

Business process management is a highly effective, budget-sensitive way to achieve greater productivity, reduced time to market, and improved efficiency and flexibility—if it’s deployed properly.

But get it wrong, and those processes and procedures can be trouble. Overdone processes stifle initiative with red tape, while undermanaged processes breed chaos. Even organizations that carefully document their processes are prone to filing them away, rarely consulted, or failing to see them through to successful implementation.

Successful Business Process Management helps you hit the sweet spot, introducing enough rigor to achieve the benefits of strong and mature processes, while avoiding strangulation, redundancy, and inefficiency. This just-right guide supplies a clear overview of process management fundamentals and step-by-step instructions on how to define and write procedures, then roll them out and monitor results. The book’s approach is unprecedented in clarity and usefulness, as it:

• Links multiple processes into a complete process system that propels corporate goals, rather than looking at only one process at a time
• Bypasses jargon and unnecessary complexity so that anyone handed business process responsibilities can quickly master the basics
• Adapts to the specific needs of your company, including size, industry, and culture, and avoids one-size-fits-all approaches
• Adds incremental improvements into your process system, often the more realistic approach than starting from scratch
• Addresses essential skills you’ll need, such as facilitating meetings and driving change throughout the organization
• Walks you through the entire process, from overcoming resistance to documenting standard procedures to assessing their impact and making ongoing improvements

Clearly someone at my publisher is way better at marketing wordings than I am!

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

holiday visits

We get to spend the holiday weeks with my husband’s parents, who are good company and considerate guests, in the beautiful and comfortable lakefront house that is one of our favorite places in the world, and we are privileged to also be hosting my husband’s 95-year-old grandfather, who is in great shape mentally and physically and is as wise and kind as he ever was, as a guest over the holidays.

The other way to view that is that we’re stuck with the in-laws for nine days in one house, we have to give up our own bedroom during all that time, and cooking and cleaning for five people (two of whom have food restrictions) is a hell of a lot of work.

I’m hoping I can keep the former perspective rather than the latter most of the time. It helps that everything I said about them is true, and also that my FIL is very happy to help with cleanup and my MIL with cooking. The thing I mind most is giving up our bedroom. The other alternative is to keep our own room, give the grandfather the best guest room, and put the parents-in-law on the futon (it has a spring mattress and is supportive and comfortable). But our room has the best bed. It also has an en-suite master bathroom, which is convenient when you have kidneys that have seen most of a century go by, so we’ll probably give it up. Instead of staying on the futon ourselves, though, we may stay in a downstairs room, on either an inflatable bed or a thick eggcrate foam pad we bought to make our spare bed in Taiwan comfortable. (That bed was nearly as hard as a floor, if the foam made it comfortable, and it did, it ought to be OK on a floor.) Or both. That way we have our own bath down there, which even includes a steam shower, and it’s very convenient to get up and go erg in the next room over.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.