Business Process Modeling, Management and Mining
Business Process Discovery
Prof. Cesare Pautasso
http://www.pautasso.info
[email protected]
@pautasso
Discovery Goals
Processes are hidden in organizations, waiting to be found
Identify Processes: distinguish processes, select the important ones
Represent Processes: gather knowledge about processes so that they can be modeled
What we do
Who does what
How we do it
Enterprise Organization
Rummler Brache
Value System
Michael Porter
Enterprises add value by collaborating with suppliers and delivering to customers their products through sales and distribution channels
Enterprise Value Chain
Michael Porter
Primary Functions directly add to the value generated by an enterprise
Support Functions enable the efficient execution of the primary functions
Types of Processes
- Management Processes: control and steer the organization
- Core Processes: generate value, directly interact with customers
- Support Processes: acquire resources
What to identify?
Process Owner: who is responsible?
Process Goal: what is the purpose?
Process Scope: what are the boundaries between processes?
Process Portfolio: what are the important processes?
Stakeholders
Suppliers: are needed for the success of the process (provide input, involved in upstream processes)
Owner: responsible for the process success
Participants: involved directly in the process (but may have a narrow perspective about it)
Customers: depend on the successful outcome of the process (only see the output, involved in downstream processes)
Gathering Knowledge
- Centralized workshops - all stakeholders present their perspective in the same meeting
- Facilitate knowledge sharing and organizational learning
- Conflicting views can be immediately discussed
- Only works for small organizations
- Distributed interviews - multiple meetings with individual or small groups of stakeholders
- The only practical way to learn from large organizations
- Challenging to resolve inconsistencies
Discovering Organizations or Processes?
Alec Sharp
This indicates some confusion between mapping the organization and discovering its processes. Some processes are cross-functional, and the same units may run multiple processes.
Process Goals
Functional: the main purpose of the process (e.g., purchase supplies, hire staff, find customers, develop new products)
Non-Functional: hard criteria for success (time, cost, quality, satisfaction, compliance) with the corresponding metrics, thresholds and priorities
Process Scope
Abstraction Level
coarse-grained vs. fine-grained
Boundary
separation between distinct processes
Abstraction Levels
- Make Money for the Company
- Keep Customers Happy
- Develop new products
- Find customers that want to buy them
- ensure printers have enough paper
- close the headquarters every night
Abstraction Levels
- Value Chains
- Main Processes
- Sub Processes
- Activities
Coarse vs. Fine Grained
Coarse Grained Processes are too large to study and optimize. Too many people are involved: gathering knowledge and applying changes becomes expensive.
Improving Fine Grained Processes may lead to local optimizations where the overall performance is not improved
Activities or Processes?
Gathering Knowledge
- Top-Down - start from the top of the organization (strategic view) and refine the knowledge progressively moving towards operational processes
- Bottom-Up - observe people while they work, follow the progress of specific pilot cases as they move through the involved business functions, reconstruct processes from parially overlapping views with the risk of incomplete information
Scoping: Case/Function Matrix
Define process boundaries depending on organizational aspects (which business functions are involved) and a classification of cases (which way different products/services are handled)
Case Types
Product Types: life vs. health insurance, book vs. magazine, software vs. hardware
Service Type: prepaid vs. contract subscriber
Geographic Location: Continent, Country, Regional Markets
Channel: in person, telephone, email, Web
Customer: new, returning, frequent flyer
Case types can be a combination of any of the above classification dimensions
Business Functions
Define what the organization does to handle the various case types
4. Deliver Product and Services
4.2. Procure Materials and Services
4.2.4. Manage Suppliers
4.2.4.4. Monitor Quality of Product Delivered
Functions are refined and decomposed up to a level of detail that can help discover organizational units that can play different process roles
See the APQC Process Classification Framework reference model
Aside: Reference Models
Alec Sharp
Why can't we use reference process models instead of going through all the effort of process discovery?
- Overwhelming due to extremely fine granularity
- Early stakeholder involvement in discovery helps to get buy-in later with process improvement
- Adapting a complex reference model may take even more work than discovering processes from scratch
Reference Models help to prepare the discovery process and ensure that important details have not been overlooked
Case/Function Matrix
- Determine which functions are performed for each case type
- Aggregate related functions and case types into the same process boundary
Coarse grained
One big process covers all functions and all case types
Fine grained
A process every time a function can be performed for each case type
Medium grained
Tradeoff between broad scoping and narrow focus, some functions collaborate over more than one case type, but not all.
References
- Porter, Michael E., "Competitive Advantage". Ch. 1, pp 11-15. The Free Press. New York, 1985
- Geary A. Rummler, Alan P. Brache, Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space in the Organization Chart, Jossey-Bass, May 1995
- Marlon Dumas, Marcello La Rosa, Jan Mendling, Hajo Reijers, Fundamentals of Business Process Management, Chapter 2, Springer, 2013, ISBN 978-3-642-33142-8
- M. Rosemann, “Process Portfolio Management”, BPTrends, April 2006