2. Overview
• These are some of the questions and comments that we as Process
Analysts get to hear a lot.
• The answer is very simple.
“Why should we spend time and money to model our processes?”
“If it ain't broke don't fix it!”
“How do you know it ain’t broke?
• Unless everyone involved in the process knows what they are doing,
how they are doing it, what is the impact of their activities on the
process, and most importantly how are they doing compared to their
competitors, one cannot tell if it’s broke or not.
• These are the answers you get from a process modeling effort.
3. Overview (contd…)
• The mind map below, lists a few reasons why process modeling is so
important, and why every organization should invest in that effort.
4. Current State (AS-IS)
• The first step is to model your
current end-to-end processes
(a.k.a. as-is).
• Regardless of what techniques
you use, so many unknowns
will come to light that you did
not even know were happening
or causing issues.
5. Process Hand offs
• Most processes run across departments.
• Within an organization you cannot work in departmental
silos, yet each department is only familiar with their part in
the process.
• Gaps, redundancies and incorrect expectations can be
identified and eliminated when all stakeholders look at the
complete process.
6. Common Language
• Process modeling effort helps in eradicating all the
homegrown process models that use notations only
understandable to the teams that created them.
• Their meaning is lost in translation when someone from
outside the team tries to understand them.
• Try searching for process models on the internet, and you
will see plethora of notations that absolutely do not make
sense.
7. Process Hierarchy
• Creating hierarchies, helps
model the process with
correct level of details.
• It also helps communicate
the right amount of
information to different levels
of management while talking
about process improvement.
8. Enterprise Repository
• Another advantage of this effort at organizational level is
that it results in an Enterprise repository that is shared
and is accessible to anyone.
• You always have access to all the versions of a process
and comments from users who worked on them.
• Majority of tools now also provide collaborations i.e.
multiple users can work on same process model.
9. Industry Benchmarks
• When processes are modeled
and various performance
indicators are captured, it helps
in benchmarking against
organizations internal
standards and industry
standards.
10. Future State (TO-BE)
• Modeling of as-is processes is just the first step. Use the
outputs from this activity to identify issues, bottlenecks,
redundancies and gaps in the process.
• Look at opportunities to automate various unnecessary
and time consuming manual handovers.
• This will help you come up with the future state where you
would like to be and then continuously keep reevaluating
(a.k.a. continuous improvement).
11. About
• Adeel Javed is a Middleware consultant with more than 9
years of software development, design and architect
experience of enterprise-wide BPM/BAM/SOA
applications. He works for Technlogix, Inc.
www.techlogix.com
