Modelling the Business

Knowing what is done by whom, and why, and when, is fundamental to any change initiative. Modelling business activities shows us where improvements can be made and what benefits to expect.

Finding circular processes and unnecessessary approval steps are the sort of issues that process modelling will highlight. Every manual intervention and departmental hand-off has the potential for error and delay. And it is with the aid of process models that we hope to identify and eradicate such issues.

Our aim must be to prevent bad or reduntant processes being migrated into a new system in the same way that we should when migrating data.

Process Modelling

Most people see only one small part of the process that they contribute to.

Gaining an overall view of each process is therefore vital to any analytical study. Starting with who and what triggers the process we must follow through to it's conclusion.

The events that trigger business processes can be divided into three types:

• External events - are those that occur when there is an interaction with another entity. This can be another system or person such as a customer contacting the helpdesk.
• Internal events - these are completely under the control of the business and are often the result of policy decisions such as seasonal price adjustments.
• Time and system based events - these are recurring and predictable, such as financial reporting and system maintenance.

A popular way to model process flows is to place the decision and action points into a chart divided with parallel lines representing departmental and external involvement. Movement between these entities can then be easily tracked.

Because of their appearance these are commonly called Swimlane Diagrams.

Business Activity Modelling

There are numerous activities carried out to support every business output.

Often business managers and owners do not themselves realize what goes into their products and the Business Analyst will do well to assist them in getting a consistent and business-wide view of their organization.

Business Activities can be categorized as:

• Doing activities are concerned with the actual product delivery or point of sale activities.
• Enabling supply chain management, recruitment, sourcing raw materials, and the design and development of products and services.
• Planning performance and product management, strategy, benchmarking, and target setting.
• Monitoring performance against plan. Sales level reporting, customer satisfaction, supplier SLA's etc.
• Controlling by changing processes, suppliers, or targets; staffing or stock level realignments.

Modelling Business Perspectives

Most businesses are multi-faceted and each needs to be explored.

For example, an Operations Manager is focused on the function and maintenance of systems whereas a Sales Managers concern is with selling more products. The Helpdesk in turn, sees preventing and resolving customer complaints as most important.

These perspectives can hold the key to business success.

e.g., When two companies are selling similar products or services, then the main differentiator between them may indeed be customer support!

Gap Analysis

After producing the 'As Is' business model, the next step is to produce the 'To Be' model.

The difference between these models is then analysed to determine what is required to progress from what exists now to what is to be achieved.

This might involve new products or systems but it might also be streamlined processing and increased efficiencies.

Conclusion

Models are essential to  the understanding of large businesses.

Identifying overly complex or redundant processes are significant benefits of process modelling.

Models allow us to easily appreciate different business perspectives.

Use of 'As Is' and 'To Be' models provides the basis for our Gap Analysis.