Designing a to be process

1. Designing a To-Be Process
By Romana Hnatkivska
5/16/2015

2. About the speaker
 Business Analyst at SoftServe
 8 years total experience in IT
 CCBA – Certification of Competency in Business Analysis
 Projects in Healthcare and Human Resource
Management

3. About the topic
 Today’s business demands constant change
 Legacy systems often function-centric and hard to change
 Multiple channels for interactions with customers
 Increasing demand for customer self-service
 Focus shifting from applications to managing and optimizing
processes.
 Demand for process agility

4. Agenda
 Definitions
 Typical Process Flaws
 Process Optimization Principles
 Process Optimization Anti-Patterns
 Q&A

5. What is a business process?
A collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input
and creates an output that is of value to the customer.
Hammer & Champy, 1993
A process is essentially a way an organisation can choose to
organize its resources (people and their work, equipment,
information, etc.) to accomplish necessary results. Processes
exist only to produce desired outputs (results).
Alec Sharp

6. What is a business process?
 Has a specific objective
 Has a customer
 Runs from trigger to result
 Cross-functional
 Has boundaries

7. What about workflow?
A workflow consists of an orchestrated and
repeatable pattern of business activity.
It is a sequence of operations, declared as
work of a person or group, an organization
of staff, or one or more simple or complex
mechanisms.
Workflow may be considered a view or
representation of real work.

8. Types of Business Processes
 Management processes
 Operational processes
 Support processes

9. Example: Move telephone service
Capture service order
Assign network facilities
Install premise equipment
Confirm service quality
Activate customer account
Customer requests
telephone service
moved
1. Telephone service
moved
2. Active account
3. Receivable posted

10. Example: Staffing Process

11. The BA perspective
Business analysis is the practice of enabling change in an
enterprise by defining needs and recommending solutions
that deliver value to stakeholders.
Business analysis can be used to understand the current state,
to define the future state, and to determine the activities
required to move from the current to the future state.
BABOK 3.0

12. AS-IS vs TO-BE
 AS-IS Process – how a business
process currently works
 TO-BE Process – an envisioned future
state of how a business process will
work

13. How to improve a business process?
Automate it!
Or not?

14. The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation
applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The
second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will
magnify the inefficiency.
Bill Gates
Automation simply provides more efficient ways of doing the wrong
kinds of things.
Michael Hammer

15. First, find out what is broken in the current
process!

16. Typical Process Flaws
 Too much manual work
 Too much tracking and control
 Outdated assumptions on what is important to the
customer of the process
Alec Sharp

17. Diagnosing the AS-IS process
Dan Madison
Four lenses of analysis:
 Frustration
 Quality
 Time
 Cost

18. Example: Permit Issue Process
Dan Madison
Main problem: Incomplete information on permit forms
Need: Ensure all the information that was needed was in
place from the beginning
The amendments to the process included:
 Single point of contact
 Permits clustered, with a separate process for each cluster
 Check sheets and templates

19. Key Process Design Principles
 Design the workflow around value-adding activities, not
around job titles, functions, departments, or locations
 Ensure a continuous flow of the "main sequence" – those
activities that directly add value to the customer

20. Key Process Design Principles
 Make sure work is performed where it makes the most sense

21. Key Process Design Principles
 Provide a single point of contact for customers and suppliers
whenever possible

22. Key Process Design Principles
 Consider every handoff as an opportunity for error (delay,
loss, contamination)
 Have as few people as possible involved in the
performance of a process

23. Key Process Design Principles
 If the inputs naturally cluster, create a separate process for each
cluster

24. Key Process Design Principles
 Redesign the process first, then automate it

25. Key Process Design Principles
 Bring downstream information needs upstream
 Capture information once at the source and share it widely

26. Key Process Design Principles
 Push decision-making down to the lowest levels that make sense

27. Key Process Design Principles
 Use simulation, practice, or role play to test new process designs
risk free

28. Key Process Design Principles
 If your process deals with complexity, consider using teams
 Co-locate or network the teams

29. Key Process Design Principles
 Create a process consultant for cross-functional processes

30. Key Process Design Principles
 Reduce or eliminate bottlenecks
Various sources

31. Key Process Design Principles
 Reduce or eliminate backlogs

32. Key Process Design Principles
 Reduce the time required to complete a process
 Time to perform a task
 Wait time between tasks

33. Key Process Design Principles
 Consider which tasks are not inter-dependent and could be done
in parallel

34. Process Optimization Anti-Patterns
Rainer Stropek
 Optimize during initial development
 Optimize without measuring
 Measure in non-representative environments
 Optimize without a baseline
 Optimize without specific, quantifiable goals
 Optimize without knowing the basics
 Optimize everything at once
 Confuse performance with user experience

35. Assess proposed improvements against
business goals

36. Goal Assessment

37. The objectives must be specific and measurable
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
Peter Drucker

38. Metrics in business process optimization

39. References
 Alec Sharp “Workflow Modeling”
 Daniel Madison “Process Mapping, Process Improvement, and Process
Management”
 BPM CBOK

40. Questions?

41. Thank you!