Chapter 2.1 Process Identification

Question 1

What is the goal of Process Identification?

What is the output?

Answer 1

Process identification is a set of activities aiming to systematically define the set of business processes of a company and establish clear criteria for prioritizing them.

The output is: process architecture, which represents the business processes and their interrelations

Question 2

process identification is based on two phases, what are they?

Answer 2

Process identification that is based on two phases: designation and evaluation.

• The designation phase is concerned with the definition of an initial list of processes.
• The evaluation phase considers suitable criteria for defining priorities of these processes

Question 3

What are the key activities in the designation phase?

Answer 3

• Enumerate the major processes

- Determine the relationships between the processes

Question 4

What is a difficulty in the designation phase?

Answer 4

First problem is to identify the existing processes. One difficulty here arises from the hierarchical nature of business processes: different criteria can be considered for determining which chains of operations can be seen as forming an independent business process and which ones are seen as being part of another process.

Question 5

What is the trade-off in the designation phase?

What is the advantage and disadvantage?

Answer 5

The main conclusion from this is that the number of processes that are identified in the designation phase must represent a trade-off between impact and manageability. The smaller the number of the processes one wishes to identify, the bigger their individual scope is. In other words, if only a small number of processes is identified then each of these will cover numerous operations.

• The main advantage of a large process scope is that it potentially increases the impact one can have with actively managing such a process. The more operations are considered to be part of a process, the easier it will become, for example, to spot opportunities for efficiency gains by rooting out redundant work.
• On the other hand, a large scope of a business process brings along a range of issues that make it more difficult to manage it as a process:

Question 6

Explain how the trade-off between impact and manageability works out for broad and narrow processes, respectively.

Answer 6

A broad process has by definition a large scope. Managing it actively potentially can have a large impact on an organization’s performance. The flip side is that it is more difficult to actively manage such a broad process or the improvement projects that are related to it. For a narrow process, this is exactly the other way around: given its smaller scope, it is more easily managed but it will probably have a lesser impact on an organization’s performance as a whole.

Question 7

What are the criteria of the evolution phase?

Answer 7

Evaluation phase
Various criteria for the evaluation:
• Importance: assessing the strategic relevance of each process.
- Goal: find out which processes have the greatest impact on the company’s strategic goals.
• Dysfunction: render a high-level of judgment of health of each process.
• Feasibility: determine how susceptible they are to process management initiatives. Most notably, culture and politics involved in a particular process may be obstacles to achieve results from such initiatives.