Not surprisingly, Business Process Analysis involves gathering a large amount of information and lots of analysis. The method in which this information is collected and analysed continues to be open for debate, but at this stage, we won't side with any specific method of interpretation.
For both incremental or holistic approach, the overall purpose of undertaking Business Process Analysis is to improve the flow of a manual or automated system by eliminating or reducing bottlenecks, starvation and blocking. To put it more simply, the goal of BPO/BPA is to improve efficiency, documentation, timeliness and reduce waste associated with enabling a business.
Bottleneck
A bottleneck is a phenomenon where the performance or capacity of an entire system is limited by a single or limited number of components or resources
Starvation
Starvation occurs when a downstream activity is idle with no inputs toprocess because of upstream delays
Blocking
Blocking occurs when an activity becomes idle because the next downstream activity is not ready to take it.
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In the domain of content management, the practice of Business Process Analysis systems most often relates to the efficiency and cost gains that can be made within automated systems. Whilst certainly there are improvements to be made by improving knowledge workers methods, significant gains continue to be made by focusing on the technology and how it integrates with other existing technology.
Key to the ability of executing any Business Process Analysis is collection of requirements and other relevant documentation. Instead of just taking service level agreements and key performance indicators as set in stone, we need to understand how they were formed. Was it a suggestion from the vendor? Based on previous experience? Based on knowledge of the system? Often one of these taken inisolation can give a very poor indication of expected performance, and as the bottlenecks defined earlier, should there be one earlier in a process; the entire SLA (or achievement of) will be skewed.
By sitting down, spending time with the business and analysing what they do, we can start to form a picture of the business process. By interviewing various stakeholders, we can understand the important steps and phases in a process and how it fits within the whole business. Only after conducting all of this work and looking from the business's point of view, can we start piecing together some plans as to what improvements may be made.
Documation Pty Ltd will quite happily arrange a time for an initial consultation based on your business needs, however for any Business Process Analysis there must be commitment from both IT and the Business.
Bojan Turk works for Documation Pty Ltd - http://documation.com.au
Documation are an independently owned Australian business providing Enterprise Content Management solutions to customers of all sizes and industry sectors.
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