Alec Sharp

Business processes matter, because business processes are how value is delivered. Understanding how to work with business processes is now a core skill for business analysts, process and application architects, functional area managers, and even corporate executives. But too often, material on the topic either floats around in generalities and familiar case studies, or descends rapidly into technical details and incomprehensible models. This workshop shows how to discover and scope a business process, clarify its context, model its workflow with progressive detail, assess it, design a new process, and make the transition to other types of requirements. Everything is backed up with real-world examples, and clear, repeatable guidelines.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify a “true” business process, and specify its boundaries and goals
• Describe the key factors that differentiate process and functional approaches
• Employ a variety of techniques to keep stakeholders involved, and promote “process orientation”
• Establish the scope, issues, and goals for a business process
• Model process workflow at progressive levels of detail using Swimlane Diagrams
• Stop process modeling at the appropriate point, and move on to other techniques or phases
• Conduct a structured assessment of a business process with respect to its environment
• Design a new process while avoiding common (and serious!) pitfalls
• Smoothly make the transition to the specification of IT and other types of requirements