Final | October 2018 | v1.0.0 | OFFICIAL-Public | QGCIO

Purpose

This document describes two specific techniques that can be used by organisations to identify their business processes.

Organisations provide value through the delivery of business services. These business services are ultimately implemented through processes. A business process encompasses tasks, participants and supporting systems that work together to produce a result that is of value to the organisation.

Table 1 - Business process identification techniques

Value chain analysis

Value chain analysis is the recommended technique when the business drivers for the modelling and analysis activity can be fundamentally linked to a business service.

The underlying assumption is by identifying all segments of a business service lifecycle, the underlying processes for each life cycle segment can be derived. The figure below is an example of a value chain for a training service.

Figure 1 - Example value chain for a training service

Context diagram analysis

Business process context analysis is the recommended technique when the business drivers for the modelling and analysis activity can be fundamentally linked to the stakeholders impacted by the business processes. These stakeholders can be either people or organisations (either physical or logical). Context analysis allows you to derive a list of business processes that are triggered by stakeholders for a particular area of interest.

The organisation should identify all internal and external stakeholders that consume services or receive deliverables for decision making. Use a context diagram to identify business processes that support service production and consumption, and/or information submission and provision. In the process context diagram below, continuous flow lines represent process names and dashed flow lines represent information flows.

Figure 2 - Example business process context diagram

Regardless of the technique used, there are a number of generic rules when naming business processes.

• Apply a consistent naming convention starting with a verb followed by a business object noun e.g. register customer.
• The name should reflect the objective and outcome of the process. Specify ‘what’ is being done and be precise and concise.
• Avoid generic verbs such as manage, process, handle, maintain as they do not provide any indication of what the business process sets out to achieve e.g. does manage payment mean receiving payment or making payment.
• Should not include the words to, and, for and from in the names, unless these words form part of the business object noun.