5.1 The Setting Of Process Discovery

  • Process Discovery = The act of gathering information about an existing process and organizing it in terms of an as-is process model.
  • Modeling can only start when enough information is gathered.
  • Phases of process discovery:
    1. Defining the setting = Assembling a team in a company responsible for working on the process.
    2. Gathering information = Building an understanding of the process using different discovery methods.
    3. Conducting the modeling task = Organizing the creation of the process model in a systematic way.
    4. Assuring process model quality = Guarantee that the resulting process models meet different quality criteria to ensure trust in the model.
Aspect Process Analyst Domain Expert
Modeling Skills strong limited
Process Knowledge limited strong
  • Process Analyst
    • Responsible for driving the modeling an analysis of a business process.
    • Not familiar with all the details of the business process.
    • Secure commitment of various domain experts for providing information on the process.
  • Domain Expert
    • Any individual who has intimate knowledge about how a process or activity is performed.
    • Multiple domain experts can be involved, each has a different perspective on the process.
    • All the domain experts should jointly have insight into the whole process.
    • Ex. Process participants, process owner/manager, suppliers, customers.
  • Process Discovery Challenges
    1. Fragmented process knowledge
      • Business process consist of a set of logically related activities.
      • These activities are assigned to specialized participants.
      • Domain experts know little about the whole process and a lot about their own task.
        • Different ideas of the expected output.
        • Rules of the process are not explicitly defined in detail.
        • Difficult to puzzle the different views together.
        • A process analyst needs to talk with several domain experts.
      • Multiple iterations:
        1. Receive input from domain experts.
        2. Proposal for resolving inconsistencies.
        3. Receive approval/feedback/input from domain experts.
        4. etc.
    2. Thinking in cases
      • Domain experts can easily describe activities performed for a specific case, but have problems responding to general questions about how the process works in a general way.
        • " You cannot really generalize, every case is different. "
        • Process analysts need to keep asking questions to reverse engineer the conditions that govern the routing decisions in the business process
    3. Lack of familiarity with process modeling languages
      • Domain experts are often not trained to create and READ process models themselves.
      • The process analyst often needs to explain the model in a natural-language to get feedback from the domain experts.
  • Profile of a process analyst
    • Five Factor Model (certain personal dispositions that help becoming an expert in process analysis)
      1. Openness (appreciating art, emotion, and adventure)
      2. Conscientiousness (tendency to self-discipline, achievement and planning)
      3. Extraversion (being positive, energetic, and seeking company)
      4. Agree-ableness (being compassionate and cooperative)
      5. Neuroticism (being anxious, depressed and vulnerable).
    • Process analists apprear to be strong in Conscientiousness and Extraversion.
    • Creation of positive atmosphere despite enterprise-internal politics.
    • How process analists navigate trough a project is mainly influenced by former experiences.
    • Expert process analists pay specific attention to the following aspects:
      1. Getting the right people on board.
        • Make sure the hierarchy backs the process participant involvement in the process discovery
      2. Having a set of working hypotheses on how the process is structured at different levels of details.
        • Prepare a extensive set of questions and assumptions to be discussed in workshops or interviews.
      3. Identifying patterns in the information provided by domain experts.
        • Pieces of information typically refer to specific control structure. (gateways etc.)
      4. Paying attention to model aesthetics.
        • Models have to look nice to be engaging to a wide audience.
        • Us the right level of abstraction
          • You should not show a super-detailed model to an executive-level manager.