The well-known management expert Peter F. Drucker said that knowledge worker productivity is the most important value of companies of the 21st Century. More and more companies are realizing that better support for knowledge work is the key factor to create unique value. Adaptive case management as method and technology to manage unpredictable knowledge worker processes is challenging the status quo to fill this gap. Traditional process management does not fit for knowledge workers, because it is too inflexible. It is like a virtual assembly line. Adaptive Case Management, however, opens the world of ad-hoc workflows and autonomous decisions to process management and thus achieve productivity of knowledge work. Details: http://www.semigator.de/schulungen/Adaptive-Case-Management-On-Demand-Videos-1403025-0

1. Use Case: Welcome back Leona – Developer, Constant Learner, Constant Sharer
The use case we have chosen is a similar use case as in (Swenson, et al., 2010) and so you
already know Leona, the engineer.
Leona is a developer whose responsibility is to resolve critical tickets based on customer bug
reports. She uses ACM to create templates that allow for tracking the tickets and for
constant process improvement for development and testing. Still she feels like a bottleneck
and suffers from her workload becoming unbearable: She is the only person knowing how to
test a critical component and she sees herself testing until late evenings and weekends. So,
she decides to start sharing her knowledge in order to enable her peers to participate in the
same task – and her to experience better work – life- balance.
Thus she leaves her glorified status of being the sole owner of this secret knowledge behind,
opens the door to her experience for her peer Steve and thus forms a team that
collaboratively learns on how to improve their software component and meet demanding
project goals.
Basing the use case on the example of Leona has the advantage to deepen an already
introduced context based on the suggested approaches towards knowledge sharing through
mentoring. It is both concrete and abstract in the sense that many of the real-time
requirements and solutions found in other industries and contexts are assembled and
generalized. The concepts discussed are applicable in many industries; they are based on
customer interactions in the area of public services, banking and trading, logistics,
engineering etc.
The case study demonstrates how ACM is instrumental in supporting the mentoring process,
and thus leveraging the sustainable distribution of knowledge within an organization. To the
authors, this is the most imortant pattern of knowledge work, because it is the one that
multiplies living knowledge.
The first step towards living knowledge: Learning by Doing
The tool Leona uses for „learning by doing“ is case templates. This has already been
described in (Swenson, et al., 2010).

2. In adaptive case management case instances emerge as they are necessary. This means the
knowledge worker can start the work without any templates: Just with the empty ACM
system. A knowledge worker enters the first case, just as the working day requires from
them. If they want, they can work in that way forever adding case by case. It also has been
shown in (Swenson, Kraft, Palmer, & al., 2011) how the timeline can be managed by defining
sprints and assigning work to these sprints, and how the performance can be managed by
using the burndown diagram. So this is not repeated here.
In the case study described here, the problem ticket is created with account details and
contact information in salesforce.com. The ID is linked to the case and based on a pre-
developed salesforce.com connector package. It is possible now for Leona to link her
“resolve customer problem” case to the salesforce.com problem ticket and thus to update
the ACM case from the salesforce ticket and the salesforce ticket from the ACM case. In this
scenario the problem ticket in saleforce.com is a very specific business object with specific
attributes and relationships in the area of customer service, while the ACM case is more
general purpose – comparable to the general purpose of a workflow. With this generality of
course comes much more flexibility. Also, by using this link it is possible to close the problem
ticket via a web service when the ACM case is closed.
The details of this integration are out of scope for this case study. We want to mention
though that this kind of integration between an ACM tool and salesforce.com has been
achieved in a concrete project and that it is demonstrable.
Figure 1 Service Ticket in salesforce.com

3. At the beginning with a plain vanilla ACM project, each case looks different than all the
others. As work becomes repeated, the individual knowledge worker identifies snippets of
cases that he might want to convert into a personal template and reuse. Then, and this is at
the core of living knowledge, these personal templates become commoditized, so they can
be used by others in the same role.
Figure 2 Learning by doing: Creating Templates
The second step towards living knowledge: Baking process knowledge into templates
At a certain stage Leona has created a lot of cases and respective templates to solve specific
customer problems. Now she finds that some parts of these cases are similar with other
cases. Leona finds, that the remote software checks are repeated in many cases, because
they have proven to be useful. This is the identification of best practices.
Now, a first step towards process improvement is to create a template for these tests,
including attachments and links for detailed test instructions. These test instructions might
be simple at the beginning, some scanned paper notes, because the template is only for
Leona, only for herself to use it. Still it helps her to remember the exact steps that have to be
performed when executing the tests. The template has become her process memory.
So from now on, the work for Leona has become even easier.

4. Figure 3 Leona doing all the work alone
The third step towards living knowledge: Conquer and divide – start to delegate
Of course it is possible to maintain responsibility within a case for workitems, and in this
phase Leona maintains herself to be responsible for these tests. She doubts that anybody
else has enough knowledge to perform these tests apart from her. But of course it is
annoying to maintain the responsibility in each case instance, so the looks for a better
solution. The case template allows to maintain a role for the responsibility, in this case the
role “engineer”. Leona maintains “engineer” as the responsible role for those tests. We are
showing this, because in classical process modeling, it is necessary to define the roles first,
then assign activities to roles – for example in BPMN by assigning activities to swimlanes in
pools, and then assign the persons to roles before the activities can be executed by a person
(see Figure 5). In ACM the sequence can be the other way around.
Then, when she takes over the template to her case, and if she is the only engineer, she is
selected. If she is not the only engineer, a responsibility determination mechanism, that can
either be manual or by some rule (for example a decision table), or a combination of both,
sets the right responsible knowledge worker, the owner of the task. Manual responsibility
determination provides a selection of persons that have the role or also additional persons
(because the knowledge worker can always override the role proposal). For rule bases
responsibility determination it is necessary to provide functions to maintain those rule and
also functions to add and describe a new role within a workstream. Responsibility
determination is an interesting topic in itself, but is not the main focus of this case study.
Also responsibility determination has been discussed in classical BPM already – and there is
no major difference in BPM responsibility determination and ACM responsibility
determination – except that it can be performed also while the case is already running while
in BPM it is only performed at the start of a process. However in this case it is clear, Leona is
the only engineer in this workstream and so she will be assigned as responsible person.

5. Figure 4 Role in Template
Figure 5 Role Assignment in BPMN modeling
Later, templates of individual knowledge workers might be shared with other knowledge
workers of a group, so team members can benefit from the knowledge, and the delegation
of repetitive tasks becomes easier, while still some guidance in how the work shall be
performed can be passed along. It is better to share a proven method than a theoretical
construct that has never been executed before.
The fourth step towards living knowledge: Sharing knowledge through Mentoring
Over time Leona thinks that it makes sense to include Steve into the work – so Steve can
relieve some work from her. Steve is her colleague. He does not know as much as Leona,
because he is relatively new in the area. But Leona thinks: “If I describe the test steps better,
then Steve can do these”. So Leona creates some documentation about the test steps and
attaches the documentation to the first case, where Steve helps her. She assigns two tests,
namely Test Module B and Test Module C to him, because she thinks these tests are easy
enough for him to do. The has a meeting with Steve, explains a little bit about the tests and
she tells him, that there is documentation, that she has written attached to the case
worktitems for the respective tests.

6. After maintaining the case responsibilities in the ACM software, she uses the “Send To”
action of the case, that informs Steve about the case by an email and gives him the link to
find the right place and a reminder.
Figure 6 Leona delegates work to Steve
Steve performs these tests, when he has questions he asks Leona, and finally succeeds. Now
Steve has learned something and Leona has somebody else who can help her. From now on,
Leona is not the bottleneck any more for Test of Module B and Test of Module C.
The third step towards living knowledge: Sharing knowledge through a process template
repository and assigning tasks to logical roles
“This is great”, she thinks. Why not change the template, so that in the future Steve or any
other Test Assistant can support me in doing these tests, and I can reuse this as a best
practice baked into software? Said and done – Leona changes the case template in the
template library, so that now the responsible role for Test Module B and Test Module C is
the role of “Test Assistant” – after she has defined the new role of “Test Assistant” in the
workstream. Of course the roles are shared within the same workstream as well as the
knowledge workers. This has already been described in (Swenson, et al., 2010). It is also
possible to invite new knowledge workers to the workstream by email and after he has
joined to assign to him one or many roles.
As long a Steve is the only test assistant he will be selected, if the template is used in the
case, otherwise responsibility determination is done to find the right person.

7. Figure 7 Steve becomes better: Role "Test Assistant" in the Template
The limitations of BPMN for living distributed knowledge
Now let us look at how this would look like in a BPMN diagram (see Figure 8).
Figure 8 BPMN Model with two roles
In BPMN we now have two swimlanes in the pool, one for each role as BPMN prescribes. The
respective tasks are assigned to these swimlanes so it is made visible who is responsible for
which task. We have seen now, that it is a natural thing that over time these responsibilities
change. It is important to make it possible to change those responsibilities, because
otherwise there is no passing on of living knowledge. And this is one major problem in BPMN
based systems. Because once modeled, the model is used in many process instances. It is
only possible to use roles, that have been defined before the process starts.
Yes, a model can be changed as well, that is true, but it is a different effort: A model is
typically changed by a process analyst and not by Leona. Changing the model has side effects

8. on running process instances as well. So maybe a new model has to be created instead of a
new version of the existing one. Also it is often not possible to change the responsible
person in running instances manually as it is possible within a case instance.
It is a natural pattern of knowledge work that the assignment of roles and responsibilities to
tasks is not fixed once and for all time: This type of constant change is a good sign of a
healthy development of an organization. We ask you to think about it yourself, how doing
this with BPMN would affect your process landscape and why not simply use ACM to solve
that difficult problem in an easy way.
BPMN has its merits in an ACM world though: Leona can export a BPMN model from the
Template, after she has changed it, if she wants to visualize and communicate the case
template and its changes to roles and assignments.
The fifth step towards living knowledge: Acknowledge the mentees’ autonomy
It is important to recognize that autonomy is a key attribute of knowledge work. That is also
true in the mentoring relationship. Yes, the mentee is not as autonomous as the mentor, but
step by step – of course – the mentee also has to learn to become more autonomous.
Figure 9 Steve uses his autonomy to decide independently
In our example Steve, the test assistant, has his own idea as of how to perform the test he is
asked to do. In certain case instances he decides that it does not make sense to test module
B – after he has done it many times without success – but instead – it makes sense to test
Module D instead. He – as a responsible knowledge worker – decides this and takes
responsibility for it.
The sixth step towards living knowledge: Review and Consolidate distributed knowledge

9. Figure 10 Editing the case in a mindmap on iPhone
Steve had exported the case structure to a mindmap and changes it during a meeting on his
iPhone. After importing again (sending as email attachment to the ACM software) and
parsing, the case has been changed accordingly (because of course the mindmap contains
the correlation information in an attribute). (See Figure 10)
Leona does not know about the variations, because she trusts Steve that he performs the
needed checks in the area of responsibility that she has delegated to him. So after some
time the actual cases deviate from the template.
However Leona wants to check if Steve does do the work as he should have done it after
some time – just as a kind of review. For that she wants to know all the cases where the
template has been used and if it has been used in the way it was defined or not.
Figure 11 Where-used list of template
So using ACM Leona can use the “where-used” list of the Template and thus identify all the
places, where the template for the checks has been used. Also in this case study ACM helps
her to identify where the template had been used as they were (1:1) and where the case has
a deviation from the template and how the deviation looks like (difference function). Thus
she can compare the original plan with the actual executions and check, if she is fine with it
or not.

10. Also a compare function of the ACM system shows Leona which parts of the case deviate
from the original template and a statistic function shows how many cases used the same
template and how many deviated, also how the deviations were distributed based on
quantity (for example 80% add Check D while 20% remove Check B). This is very important,
because it shows the main path to success – the statistics shows the real best practices. This
is a simple kind of process mining, but not in the “fully automated” way as many propose. Of
course fully automated process mining techniques sound interesting, but in our scenario it is
more feasible to use natural knowledge and discretion of the knowledge worker instead of
artificial intelligence or arbitrary algorithms. This is absolutely in agreement with the
philosophy of the knowledge worker as an autonomous worker, who decides what to do and
when based on her goals and within the area of her constraints.
After comparing the case deviations with the templates, Leona can discuss with Steve:
“What were the reasons for the deviations?” They might also discuss whether to change the
template or not. Doing this, they have different options. One option is to change the original
template completely, containing only Check Module A, Check Module C and Check Module
D. Another option is to create a template variant containing the new combination of checks,
variant 1 containing Check Module A, Check Module B and Check Module D, while the
variant 2 contains Check Module A, Check Module C and Check Module D. Another
possibility is to change the original template in a way so that it is a maximum template, in
this example Check Module A through Check Module D – and leaving it to Steve to choose
which of these he needs in the certain case.
Figure 12 Consolidation of cases to templates
If variant 1 and variant 2 are created in a way that each variant has individual checks, then it is
possible after case creation to choose the right template variant. This might be a manual selection or
– and that is also an important requirement that has been put on ACM many times – the selection of
the template variant depends on the case type – i.e. on some attributes of the case. For example if it
is a service case or a quality assurance case of the engineering or production of the telephone

11. system, then one attribute of the case will be the product – the product number or the product
group. The product group may also be a hierarchy, which is defined in the product catalogue system
and is imported into the ACM system by means of a user defined case field and value list for the field
This makes sure that the application business semantics can be used to choose the right case
template. Depending on the product or the product group automatically the right case variant is
chosen and thus the right number and type of check is chosen, that fit to that product or product
group.
Establishing shared living knowledge through Governance
In our Knowledge worker case study, consolidation of process improvements takes place
while Leona and Steve are meeting and talking about it. In this case no governance process is
necessary. But it is not always feasible or practical to meet over the topic, and thus it is
better to include a collaboration function, that allows for governance. This makes it possible
that consolidation is an autonomous action of one knowledge worker, and the other
knowledge worker merely approves or rejects the changes. In our example Steve might want
to consolidate the changes of cases to the template library and Leona approves or rejects
these changes. Or – the other way around – Leona takes the opportunity to consolidate the
changes in the cases to the template library – and Steve is the one to approve or reject.
Figure 13 Review case for creating new template
How this is done? Simply by automatically creating a review case whenever a change to the
template library is released. The case consists of two (in other examples many) approval
items – one for Leona and one for Steve.
Using this kind of governance is also a kind of mentoring tool. Why? If Leona repeatedly
rejects the changes, that Steve makes to the template library, Steve might want to ask
himself, what he is doing wrong – or better ask Leona. Then he will have the possibility to
learn more about the subject, and he feels urged to learn this. At the same time it is a tool
for Leona to give Steve some autonomy, but still be in control of the overall result and thus

12. making sure, that the quality is assured. She identifies learning needs of Steve and thus can
teach him what he needs to know.
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Kraft, F. M., & Normann, H. (2012, April). Distribute Process Knowledge in ACM through Mentoring.
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