Describing Business Processes

How to describe a business process and assess performance and cost

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Prerequisites

What you will learn

What you will cover

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Course benefits:

The concept of a business process is simple, but what it does and why it does it may be difficult to understand and explain. Given the task of describing processes it is likely that every member of the team will have a different approach and produce documents varying in content and style.

This tutorial brings rigour to the process of describing a business process. It addresses the needs of people who must recommend and implement change. Attendees will learn how to measure efficiency and effectiveness and be able to determine the cost of a process through an understanding of the resources it consumes.

Who should attend:

This course will benefit:

  • Business Analysts
  • Applications Support Analysts
  • and anyone who needs to understand, describe and improve the business process

Prerequisites:

No prior experience is required.

What you will learn:

On successful completion of the course, attendees will be able to:

  • Define processes and business processes
  • State the standard properties of all processes
  • Apply a consistent approach to the identification and documentation of processes

What you will cover:

  • Basic Principles - Process, data and dynamics; how processes are constructed and how the parts cooperate to deliver what is required; the object, property, role and relationship model; seeing relationships in diagrams and text; seeing what is missing from diagrams and text; using techniques and tools that are appropriate to the task in hand
  • Understanding Business Processes - What processes are; what to include in a process description; structuring the process description; efficiency and effectiveness; measuring defects like cycle time, throughput, waste and yield; where processes start and end; the e-business model; feedback mechanisms
  • A Structure for Process Description - Properties, Decomposition, Data Derivation and Data Flow, Dynamics, Quantification and Resource Consumption; Requirements Traceability
  • Process Decomposition - How to represent the decomposition of processes in the system; suitable diagrams; elementary processes and their relationship to initiating events, interrupts and resumes
  • Data Derivation and Data Flow - Inputs and outputs and the application interface; inputs to and outputs from the elementary processes and process steps; the data transformation; actions (create, modify, reference and destroy) on stored data
  • The Dynamics - Process triggers - events, conditions and other processes; how processes are interrupted and resumed; describing the pre, post and exit conditions for a process; process sequence; states (data and process) and state transition
  • Quantification and Resource Consumption - Frequency and timing; processors; resources consumed; cost drivers and activity based costing
  • Requirements Traceability - Adding trace properties to Business Requirements; the 'satisfies' relationship; object lists and traceability

How you will learn:

Attendees receive a comprehensive manual and templates for process description. The underlying meta-model is based on comprehensive research into the requirements for an Information Systems Description Language (ISDL).

Duration and availability:

One day non-residential. In-house only.

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