Describing Business Processes - tutorial

How to describe a business process and assess performance and cost

Course benefits:

The concept of a business process is simple, but what it does and why 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. Attendees receive a handout and templates for process description.

Who should attend:

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

Content:

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 Tracing - Adding trace properties to Business Requirements; the 'satisfies' relationship

Duration:

Half day, in-house only.