Chapter 1 Flashcards
What is the BPM life-cycle, including the key words and brief description.
1. Process Identification Process architecture 2. Process discovery As-is process model 3. Process Analysis Insights on weakness and their impact 4. Process redesign To-be process model 5. Process implementation Executable process model 6. Process monitoring and controlling Conformance and performance insights
What is a business process?
• “Collection of events, activities, and decisions that collectively lead to an outcome that brings value to an organization’s customers.”
• Some important characteristics:
– it has customers, either internal or external to a firm interested in a particular product/service
– it crosses organizational boundaries, i.e. it occurs across or between organizational sub-units
What are the key activities of the Process Identification phase ‘Designation’?
- Enumerate the major processes
- Determine the relations between the processes
What are the key activities of the Process Identification phase ‘Evaluation’?
- Assess importance of each process
- Render high-level judgements of the dysfunctioning ‘health’ of each process
- Determine feasibility of process initiative
How were the processes at the prehistoric times?
• Prehistoric times: The worker’s focus used to be for the entire process for all products. The worker’s capabilities were pure generalist. In prehistoric times, humans mostly supported themselves or the small groups they lived in by producing their own food, tools etc. People carried out their own production processes. As a result, they had knowledge of how to product many different things. In other words, they were generalists.
How were the processes in the Ancient times?
• Ancient times: Later, the focus moved to a more entire process for a single product. The worker’s capabilities became more intermediate specialist. There was a rise of cities and city states, and the generalist started to evolve toward an intermediate level of specialism. People started to specialize in the art of delivering one specific goods(pottery, lodging, services).
Workers in this time would have a good understanding of an entire process that they were involved in, but not so much about the processes that produced the good or services they obtained from others.
How were the processes in the second industrial revolution?
Workers in this time would have a good understanding of an entire process that they were involved in, but not so much about the processes that produced the good or services they obtained from others.
How are the processes now?
• Organizations became structured along the principles of labor division: Create functional units in which people with a similar focus on part of the production process were grouped together. These units were overseen by managers with different responsibilities. Moreover, the units and their managers were structured hierarchically.
• Functional organization: emerged from the second industrial revolution.
- To sum up, the focus shifted from the entire process for all product, to single part of a process for a single product. And the capabilities from a pure generalist to a pure specialist.
What is the process identification?
In this phase, a business problem is posed, processes relevant to the problem being addressed are identified, delimited and related to each other. The outcome of process identification is a new or updated process architecture that provides an overall view of the processes in an organization and their relationships. In some cases, process identification is done in parallel with performance measure identification. In this book, however, we will associate performance measure identification with the process analysis phase, given that performance measures are often used for process analysis.
What is process architecture?
takes the form of a collection of processes and links between these processes representing different types of relation.
What is process discovery?
(also called as-is process modelling). Here, the current state of each of the relevant processes is documented, typically in the form of one or several as-is process models.
BPM identified which processes they are dealing with and which performance measures should be used. Now it is time understand the process in detail.
- Outcome of this phase is one or several as-is process model.
- As-is: reflect the understanding that people in the organization have about how work is done.
- Use UML, flowcharts, BPMN 2.0
What is process analysis?
Process analysis. In this phase, issues associated to the as-is process are identified, documented and whenever possible quantified using performance measures. The output of this phase is a structured collection of issues. These issues are typically prioritized in terms of their impact, and sometimes also in terms of the estimated effort required to resolve them.
what is process redesign?
Process redesign (also called process improvement). The goal of this phase is to identify changes to the process that would help to address the issues identified in the previous phase and allow the organization to meet its performance objectives. To this end, multiple change options are analysed and compared in terms of the chosen performance measures. This entails that process redesign and process analysis go hand-in-hand: As new change options are proposed, they are analyzed using process analysis techniques. Eventually, the most promising change options are combined, leading to a redesigned process. The output of this phase is typically a to-be process model, which serves as a basis for the next phase.
What is process implementation?
Process implementation. In this phase, the changes required to move from the as-is process to the to-be process are prepared and performed. Process implementation covers two aspects: organizational change management and process automation.
- Organizational change management refers to the set of activities required to change the way of working of all participants involved in the process.
- Process automation on the other hand refers to the development and deployment of IT systems (or enhanced versions of existing IT systems) that support the to-be process. In this book, our focus with respect to process implementation is on process automation, as organizational change management is an altogether separate field. More specifically, the book presents one approach to process automation wherein an executable process model is derived from the to-be process model and this executable model is deployed in a BPMS
What is process monitoring and controlling?
Process monitoring and controlling. Once the redesigned process is running, relevant data are collected and analyzed to determine how well is the process performing with respect to its performance measures and performance objectives. Bottlenecks, recurrent errors or deviations with respect to the intended behavior are identified and corrective actions are under taken. New issues may then arise, in the same or in other processes, requiring the cycle to be repeated on a continuous basis.
