Workaround Brainstormer
That workarounds occur in organizations is a fact. But how can they be managed effectively? First, they need to be identified.
The Workaround Brainstormer helps process owners and other stakeholders uncover previously unknown, targeted deviations from a process and form plausible hypotheses.
To try out the tool, click the button below.
Example: Coffee Coders Inc.
The input is a business process description (simplified here – a BPMN diagram would work too)
… in IT consulting, we first gather customer requirements. Then we add coffee and create software solutions.
The output is a set of Workaround Stories that are plausible within this business process:
- As a software developer, I am unproductive if the coffee machine breaks down. I therefore keep instant coffee in my desk to maintain my caffeine level.
- As a Scrum Master, my meetings are unproductive when a queue forms daily at the coffee machine. I therefore prepare filter coffee for everyone to reduce waiting time.
- As a software developer, I am unfocused when the coffee machine breaks down. I therefore switch to tea to meet my deadlines.
- As a software architect, I am unfocused when the coffee machine breaks down or the queue gets too long. I therefore prefer to work from home to be independent of the coffee machine and the queue.
We get an overview of the potentially involved people and their “Misfits” – i.e. concerns, challenges, and in particular external conditions that cause them to deviate from the target process. Some of these are undesirable (software architect working exclusively from home), while others can be the seed of an adapted target process (the strategic instant-coffee reserve).
Research Context
Workarounds as a Driver of Competitiveness
The Workaround Brainstormer is an interim result of the Change.WorkAROUND project, a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR). The project addresses the growing need for adaptability in industry, which is confronted with shorter innovation cycles and disruptive global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the energy transition. Operational employees often find creative solutions that can become the basis for process innovations when the target process learns about them (in time).
The project aims to develop new methods, tools, and organizational concepts to identify, evaluate, and translate these workarounds into process innovations.
How to Find Workarounds?
Despite their potential value, workarounds often remain hidden or undiscovered within organizational workflows. They are typically undocumented, informal, and escape the attention of process owners. With appropriate data, such process changes can be found via Process Mining – but such data often does not exist, since workarounds occur outside of IT systems or use informal communication channels. Identifying these latent workarounds is therefore a major challenge. An employee might, for example, use personal messaging apps. Employee surveys are valuable but provide an incomplete picture, as employees are often unwilling to disclose their non-standard behavior (whether out of fear, lack of time, or initiative). Can modern LLMs perhaps help form targeted hypotheses for a business process – estimating which workarounds are likely to occur?
Approach: Latent Workarounds and First Experiences
Surprisingly often, this works. The Workaround Brainstormer is a tool that makes this creative process easy and interactive.
Based on a textual process description or a BPMN diagram, it enables the generation of individual, domain-specific workarounds with just a few clicks. The approach is as follows: the process description and (optionally) additional context are inserted into a specialized prompt that instructs the LLM to systematically identify workarounds. The prompt also contains several workaround examples (few-shot examples) to improve the LLM's results. These examples can be extended via a RAG system that accesses a knowledge base of nearly 83 company-validated workarounds.
In the current version of the tool, your files are not stored – i.e. your process description and the generated workarounds only travel from your web browser to the LLM we host in Azure.
Initial experiences and experiments examining the quality and general usability of the workarounds show positive but preliminary results. In one experiment, 62 participants (industry practitioners, members of the research consortium, consulting firm employees, and students) were presented with 83 workaround stories and found that AI-generated workarounds are at a similar quality level to those produced by informed humans. Further experience shows that, in a few cases, the workarounds identified by the Brainstormer actually exist in companies and can therefore be acted upon. This is the optimal outcome of using the tool – identifying latent workarounds, evaluating them, and ultimately achieving process innovations.
The Workaround Brainstormer should therefore be seen not as an isolated tool, but as a creativity instrument that provides valuable impulses in improvement initiatives, which are then evaluated and discussed in expert groups.
Exemplary Use Cases
We see two primary use cases for the Workaround Brainstormer:
- The interactive, easy-to-understand interface allows use in workshop settings within a team working on process optimization or compliance questions for an existing business process. The workshop concludes with a selection of hypotheses about existing workarounds to be validated in the next step.
- Unlike Data Mining methods, the Workaround Brainstormer requires only a process description and no event data, making it useful for process owners to proactively assess, before launching a new process, which environmental influences might affect participants and how they are likely to respond.
Outlook – Further Development of the Brainstormer
The Brainstormer is the result of three years of research within the Change.WorkAROUND project. However, since the research is not yet complete and there is still much room for further development of the Brainstormer, we encourage you to use the tool and to provide feedback. With your feedback, you can help us further refine the tool and, ideally, create more process innovations.
A key building block of the tool is our knowledge base of workarounds observed in business processes and the insight that similar workarounds recur across organizations. This collection is welcome to grow. We look forward to your workarounds – feel free to contribute via GitHub or contact us directly: Frank.Koehne@viadee.de / LinkedIn.
User Manual
The following manual describes the functionalities of the Brainstormer for generating and deleting workarounds, as well as for customizing the prompt passed to the LLM.
Primary UI Components
Workarounds are visualized centrally on the user interface using a directed graph. This graph serves as the central exploration interface for workarounds and can be expanded during use.
The process input field, shown in the upper right, manages both the textual and visual process description; the latter can be uploaded by clicking “click to browse” or by dragging and dropping the image.
The Workaround List is the third component in the lower right of the interface. Generated workarounds are displayed in a nested structure here. To the right of the heading there is also a button for exporting the workarounds.
Generating Workarounds
Generating Initial Workarounds
After entering your process description as text in the upper right or uploading it as a BPMN diagram, you can generate the initial workarounds by clicking the “Generate Workarounds” button.
Generating Child Workarounds
After the initial workarounds have been generated, a left-click produces further child workarounds. A second prompt is used to generate similar workarounds that retain the parent's practicability, address similar problem types, and achieve similar benefits, but introduce variations in the roles considered as well as the resources and approaches used.
Removing Workarounds
Right-clicking on a node in the graph opens the context menu – here nodes and subnodes can be removed.
Adding Additional Context
In addition to the process description, the prompts can be enriched with additional information relevant to workaround generation. This can include additional information about the company, the roles involved in the process, circumstances, or specific topics of particular interest to the user. The button in the upper right next to the “Process Description” heading reveals an additional “Additional Context” input field when clicked.
Editing Few-Shot Examples
Below the input field described in the previous point, there is an “Edit Few Shot Examples” button. In this dialog, the examples passed to the prompt can be edited, removed, or new ones added.
Adding Embedded Workaround Examples
The Brainstormer offers the ability to supplement the prompt with additional workaround examples based on the process description. Clicking the “Retrieve similar Few Shot Examples” button retrieves similar workarounds from a vector database and appends them to the prompt.
FAQ
Scientifically, a workaround is a goal-oriented adaptation, improvisation, or other modification of an existing work system to overcome or circumvent obstacles, exceptions [...] that prevent its participants from achieving a desired level of efficiency, effectiveness, or other organizational or personal goals (Alter, 2014).
Workarounds are therefore not inherently bad; they can also turn out to be creative solutions for improving processes or achieving goals. We therefore recommend separating the identification and evaluation of workarounds.
Workaround Stories (inspired by the well-known User Story format) combine the key elements Actor, Context, Challenge or Misfit, Adaptive Action, and Intended Outcome into a single, coherent statement while also conveying sufficient information for analysis purposes. This enables the easy exchange of workarounds and similarity search via LLM.
It is important to understand what constitutes a good result. The Workaround Brainstormer generates plausible hypotheses. This means that the generated workarounds likely exist in the described business process. This says nothing about whether they represent useful process innovations (mastering new challenges) or are undesirable for various reasons (shadow IT, compliance violations, etc.). Deciding this would be the next (manual) process step.
In this sense, the results are good: for sufficiently detailed process descriptions, people generally cannot distinguish the generated suggestions from human-created ones.
This is flexible and showcases the strength of the LLM approach. Often good results can be achieved with just a few sentences. The more details you provide, the better the results. The LLM is also capable of processing BPMN diagrams, which are then converted to text and used as the process description. We have also obtained good results with images of processes or workplaces, or a combination of these elements.
One insight from the project is that workarounds often occur at a level of detail not captured in BPMN diagrams or formal process descriptions (e.g., "forgot safety gloves"). It is therefore helpful to use the process description to illustrate very concrete work situations and workplaces.
