In my opinion, the ideology defined by the “process owner” (company leader, department manager, person responsible for the process) is critically important when modeling and optimizing business processes. Based on the ideology (requirements, values), it is possible to formulate more reasonably proposals for structuring, optimizing the process, detailing its description, introducing new process links or excluding, transforming current process links.
It is known from practice that any business analyst can model the same process in dozens of different variants. And each variant of the process can have its own “truth of life”. Which “truth” to choose? The one that the process owner needs. Using the example of the application processing process, I will try to consider the influence of ideology on process modeling (the carrier of ideology – the process owner, remains hidden, but is invisibly present in this article). Application processing is a typical business process that “lives” inside any organization – processing a purchase application, a recruitment application, or an application for any other service inside the organization. Below, we will consider variants of role models of this process. The process is described in the simplest “procedure” notation supported by Business Studio, where I will try to illustrate the influence of ideology on the process description. A process variant in BPMN notation is also presented (Fig. 2).
For simplicity, I define ideology as a set of requirements/values/principles that the process owner transmits to the process with his/her entire way of acting, management style, communication method, etc. Requirements for centralization of application acceptance, requirements for quality control of application execution (internal assessment, i.e. assessment in the company and/or external assessment of the quality of application execution), requirements for division of responsibility between application executors, requirements for recording the fact/deadline of application execution and other requirements – all together and in total constitute the ideology that forms the basis for modeling the target process “to be”. It often happens that the process owner sharpens his/her thoughts in a dialogue with a business analyst, more deeply understands his/her requirements for setting up “his/her” business process in the context of a specific organization.
Fig. 1. Process A2 Application processing
Fig.2. Process A2 BPMN Application Processing
Table 1. Tabular description of the process.
Free text description of the business process for processing an application:
Start event: the registrar recorded the receipt of an application from the customer.
Step 1: registration, application qualification.
The registrar (an employee of the department where applications are received by phone or e-mail) registers the application, assigns attributes to it (qualifies the application), and based on the application attributes, the composition of the application performers and the further route of its processing are determined.
Step 2: organizing the execution of the application.
At the 2nd step of the process, the head of the department receives the application, checks the correctness of the application qualification, and, if everything is correct, appoints an executor of the application from his subordinates, sets a planned deadline for execution, or the deadline for the application can be standardized initially based on the attributes of the application.
Step 3: fulfilling the application.
At step 3 of the process, the performer (a specialist in this role) carries out work on the request, possibly visiting the client, and upon completion of the request, informs his/her manager about its completion.
Step 4: acceptance of the completed application.
At step 4, the manager accepts the request and closes it as completed or sends it back for revision.
This example, of course, presents a simple process (with some liberties), outside the context of the general process model, without inter-process links, etc. By further examining examples of this process, I want to emphasize a simple, but not always obvious idea that the process ideology will not automatically appear in the photographic detailing of the business analyst’s description of all the scenarios for processing an application. The business analyst can suggest something, but the ideology is imposed or unobtrusively conveyed by the company’s leaders.
The first point that can be attributed to ideology is the degree of centralization of the acceptance of applications through all channels of communication with all clients. In practice, it can be different, for example, the registrar accepts applications by phone and e-mail, and through other channels applications are accepted by other departments, for example, the client pays a personal visit to the office, he is received by employees of another specialized department in the office, and in this case they also register the application or should register it.
Option 2 of process description:
Fig.3. Process A3 Application processing.
Fig.4. Process A3 BPMN Application Processing
Fig. 5. Process A4 Application processing.
Fig.6. Process A3 BPMN Application Processing
In the 3rd version of the process description, Fig. 3, unlike the 1st and 2nd versions, the step of closing the application is given to the performer, the head of the department (the owner of the process) evaluates the possibilities of fulfilling the application, sets the task, organizes the work. The manager looks at the report on the fulfillment of applications once a month, and makes his decisions not on a daily basis for each individual application (let’s say he does not have such a need or no one asks him), but once a month, based on the results of fulfilling all applications for the month.
Other options for describing the application processing process may appear if the criteria for evaluating the process result are defined in the form of measurable indicators, for example:
- Number/percentage of requests completed on time;
- Number/share of untimely fulfilled requests;
- Number/proportion of unfulfilled requests;
- Number/proportion of requests resubmitted for execution;
- Number/proportion of requests completed by 1 employee;
- The number/share of applications that were incorrectly qualified, etc., taking into account the types of applications, types of clients, business geography and other analytical features.
Another important point that can be attributed to ideology is the management of standard deadlines for fulfilling requests, taking into account the types of requests. Does the head of the department (process owner), responsible for organizing work within the framework of fulfilling requests, have the right to influence standard deadlines, set their own planned deadlines that differ from the standard ones, etc. This determines the algorithm for calculating the indicators by which the result of the process will be measured.
It is also important that these indicators are reflected in the report and the report is discussed at a meeting on a regular basis, and decisions are made by the management. New requirements for the process, for the process owner may become separate decisions of the management.
I hope that, using the example of the application processing process, I was able to emphasize the simple, but not always obvious idea that the photographic detailing of the business analyst’s description of all the scenarios for processing an application will not automatically reveal the ideology of the process. The business analyst may suggest something, but the ideology is imposed or unobtrusively conveyed by the company’s leaders.
