Customizing business processes

This topic discusses how to customize processes.

Roles
- Business users
- Business analyst
Input: Analysis Process Model
Deliverables: customized business processes

Business process reengineering initiatives are often the impetus for improving customer experience, making the processes more effective and reduce process defects, as in Six Sigma projects. Such initiatives often lead to process automation and new requirements for access to information via service-based architectures. Having identified the processes that are required in the project scope, the business analysis team will customize each process to meet the specific needs of the organization. These customizations involve:

Analysis of aspects of the process as a whole
Process context
Context of the constituent activities of that process

Initiating scenarios
Analysis of the initiating scenarios of a process is critical to understanding how the process begins.
Completing scenarios
Analysis of completing scenarios is essential to understanding the termination conditions of a process or activity.
Decomposing processes
When customizing processes, it becomes clear that process elements can be recursively decomposed to a fine-grained level. While in many cases this provides essential detail of the requirements, in other cases it can represent a substantial analysis overhead with little return on investment.
Identifying reuse
Standard naming conventions are key to the identification of reuse across the enterprise. Without the use of standard verbs and nouns, potential reuse becomes clouded by the use of differing lexicons by different analysts. It is only through the use of agreed and understood naming conventions and definitions that multiple analysts, operating across multiple projects, can describe a set of process patterns in a way that can be clearly and unambiguously understood by all.
Actvity Customization
At this point in model customization, each activity within the scoped process should be challenged for its applicability and validity to the organization and specifically to the project under analysis. This will result in the addition of new activities and the removal of unnecessary or irrelevant existing activities from the business process. Where a new activity is required within the flow, predefined activities within the Process Model repository should be reviewed for applicability and reused where possible.
Control flows
Processes are constructed from reusable activities connected together in a logical control flow. Analysis of these control flows is an essential part of process customization.
Data flows
Once a stable control flow has been established for the process, analysis can begin of the data that flows down each control path. At analysis time, this begins with a business identification of the concepts that flow through the process. These business concepts are added as a simple name and definition pair, and identify the data requirements within the process.
Service candidate process
Some service candidates are simple automatable tasks, and are represented by a call activity in the Analysis Process Model (APM) process flow with a global task as its called element. Other service candidates may by more complex and require a subprocess to describe their detail. For these complex service candidates a global task exists in APM, but a service candidate process of the same name also exists in APM.
Roles and lanes
Further analysis of the roles and skills involved in a process leads to the assignment of activities to lanes. Lanes are horizontal or vertical bands within a process that identify the role that executes that part of the flow.

Parent topic: Customizing the Analysis Process Model