This extensively revised second edition of the acclaimed and bestselling book, Workflow Modeling serves as a complete guide to discovering, scoping, assessing, modeling, and redesigning business processes. Taking into account the feedback from clients, workshop students, business professionals and other readers of the first edition, the authors have created this thoroughly updated and expanded resource, offering you clear, current, and concise guidance on creating highly effective workflow systems for your organization.
Providing proven techniques for identifying, modeling, and redesigning business processes, and explaining how to implement workflow improvement, this book helps you define requirements for systems development or systems acquisition. By showing you how to build visual models for illustrating workflow, the authors help you to assess your current business processes and see where process improvement and systems development can take place.
Key updates and revisions include…
• Even more practical and “how-to” guidance packed with new techniques, tips, tricks, traps, and advice.
• Expanded coverage of the critical, up-front activities of running process discovery and modeling sessions.
• Additional materials and samples to help analysts demonstrate to others the key concepts and issues for business processes.
• A new, overall structure that supports a clearer, three-phase methodology reflecting how successful projects are structured.
• Refined techniques supported by better and more (over 110!) illustrations.
• An appendix containing, all in one place, an integrated example that demonstrates all work products.
• Clarification of how the book’s methods relate to the main current approaches BPM, Lean, and Six Sigma.
Find Practical guidance on how to…
• Carry out process identification, modeling, analysis, and redesign.
• Identify a true business process.
• Realize when one process ends and another begins.
• Separate business modeling from implementation modeling.
• Manage detail in a workflow model.
• Run a process modeling session.
• Assess a process.
• Generate out-of-the-box ideas for the to-be process.
Part I—Background, Principles, Overview: Business Processes—More Important Than Ever. A Brief History—How the Enterprise Came to Be Process-Oriented. Business Processes—What Are They, Anyway? The Approach in a Nutshell.
Part II—Phase 1: Establish Process Context, Scope, and Goals: Discover Business Processes. Establish Process Scope and Contents. Conduct Initial As-Is Process Assessment.
Part III—Phase 2: Understand the As-Is Process: Process Work Models—The Essentials. Process Workflow Models—Managing Progressive Detail. Process Workflow Models—The Finer Points. Develop Initial As-Is Process Workflow Model.
Part IV—Phase 3: Design the To-Be Process: Conduct Final As-Is Process Assessment. Determine To-Be Process Characteristics and Workflow.
Part V—Related Requirements Definition Techniques: Business Oriented Data Modeling. Requirement Modeling with Use Cases and Services. Appendix Case Study Illustrating Products from a Process Redesign Project.
Alec Sharp is the founder and senior consultant of Clariteq System Consulting, Ltd. in West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Serving clients from Ireland to Illinois to India, Alec’s expertise includes facilitation, strategy development, application requirements specification, data management, and of course, business process improvement. His popular workshops and conference presentations on these topics, conducted globally, unfailingly receive “excellent” ratings.
Patrick McDermott is president of McDermott Computer Decisions, Inc., in Oakland, California. He received his B.A. in Economics from California State University at Sacramento. He has served as director of the Data Management Association (DAMA).
Click here to download a sample chapter from this title in PDF format.