Hi. I'm Yulia Kosarenko, author of the book "Business Analyst: A Profession And A Mindset."
Today, we will talk about another business analysis technique called "process analysis."
Why is process analysis important?
Because every business change impacts business processes in an organization.
So what's a business process? Let's start with business system.
So a business system or enterprise takes in materials, resources and inputs
and converts them into value products and services for its customer.
And in order to do that, a business system has parts or components that participate in processes.
So the processes are what adds or creates value, or creates these products and services for our customer.
For example: open customer account, fulfill order, reconcile payments
or investigate a complaint.
What is a process? It's a repeatable sequence of activities
that's executed by one or more participants and that achieves a business outcome.
How do we do process analysis?
Well, guess what? It is also a process.
Let's take a look at the steps. First of all, you identify and name the processes.
You need to learn and understand how they work.
You need the model them.
Then you will need to analyze inefficiencies and areas for improvement
and finally, capture the requirements for the process changes.
So let's start at the beginning. First we identify and name processes.
How do we do that?
First of all, every organization will have process groups that are specific to its operations.
And then within that process group, there are individual processes.
They usually name them using a verb and noun combination.
For example, a process group called Order Management
may have processes that are called "Create Order" and "Fulfill Order."
And the process group Talent Recruitment may have processes "Screen Candidates" or "Onboard Employee."
Now we need to learn how processes work.
We need to really understand what happens inside that process. Why? What are the sequences of steps?
What are the different conditions? What may happen?
That's really important for us, to understand what is going on and how it needs to change.
So there are a few things we can do: we can analyze process artifacts,
we can interview experts and observe the process through immersion.
Let's chat about each one of them.
First of all, the artifacts. Process artifacts are anything that illustrates the process or depicts what's going on.
It could be a process flow diagram, for example, created by another analyst before you.
It may be task description for specific activities within the process.
It may be a standard operating procedure that in great detail describes everything that's happening.
And it may be examples of process outputs, communications, reports, or anything else that is produced by the process.
Then you will need interview experts. Those are the people who execute process day-to-day,
or usually those are people from Operations or Customer Service or Order Fulfillment.
And for you to do that, you will need to ask them many questions about the process.
Please describe it to me. What is the normal sequence of steps?
What is considered a successful outcome? How do you know you're done?
What is the goal of the process? Why are we doing it in the first place?
Who is accountable for each step? What are the different rules?
What can impact the normal flow? Are there any exceptions that may happen?
When does the process start and why? What are the triggers for the process?
And what needs to happen for the process to complete? How do you know that it's successful?
All of these questions will help you to understand the process.
Now there is more that you can do, and that's immersion - and that's observing a job
shadowing the people who are doing the process as they're doing it.
Immersion is a fabulous technique and I highly recommend that you explore it.
It helps you observe what people actually do, rather than what they say they do,
or rather what their managers think they do.
If you're interested in this, check out my other video on Why Change Channel about immersion.
Now as we learn and observe what happens in the process,
we will start modeling the process flows or present visually
the structure of activities and what happens when.
We can start with a simple process flow,
and that's nothing else but a sequence of rectangles connected by arrows
that shows you what happens in what sequence. For example, when you publish a book,
you will start by selecting the topic, doing some research, planning, writing and publishing.
Of course, this flow is very simple. It only shows you high-level what's happening.
But sometimes this is where you need to start.
You may also create a process flow with decision points.
That's where your process may branch in different directions, depending on a certain condition.
For example, if you're writing a book and want to publish it, a lot will depend on whether you will actually find a publisher.
If yes, you will hand the manuscript to them and they'll do the rest.
If no, you may need to do a few other steps to self-publish your book.
And that's where your decision point comes in.
And of course there are swimlane diagrams. These are the diagrams that show you
what activities are done by different people, by different roles. That's what it looks like.
Once you capture the model of the process flow that currently exists,
the most important part starts: analyzing it, understanding inefficiencies, problems
and what needs to change to make the process better.
Because remember, in theory, your process may look like this: inputs,
certain activities done in sequence, and then you get desired outputs. But that's in theory.
That's on paper. In reality, your process may be very different.
For example, it may look like this. Over the time, processes in real organizations that are run by
real people acquire a lot of process fluff. There will be some differences and
changes because different people do the tasks. Sometimes the management changes direction.
Sometimes we have to pull data from different sources because current data sources are unreliable.
There are certain tasks that perhaps nobody wants to do and people find workarounds not to do something tedious.
There may be some expert knowledge where people don't follow the book,
because they know by experience that that doesn't work.
There are so many ways where the process can and will deviate from its documentation with time.
And before you really think about automating or making process more efficient,
you need to understand all of these details. Once you understand them
then you need to start about optimizing them, identifying areas for improvements.
There's many, many ways to do it. We will not capture them all, but here are some examples:
You can ask questions like this: are there bottlenecks that can be eliminated?
Are certain steps really slowing the process down? Are there handovers that can be avoided?
Do you have two people or two roles that keep sending each other information and that really makes the process much slower?
Can one person do the whole thing?
What about sequence activities that can be parallel? What about steps that no longer make sense?
And then perhaps loops and branches in your flow that can be optimized
because they changed so much over time that there's no more logic in it.
And perhaps there are similar steps, executed by different people at different times,
that may be replicated,
and there may become a sub-flow that becomes more repeatable, and therefore more optimal.
There is many more ways you can look at this, and there are special areas
that focus just on process improvement and re-engineering,
but even thinking about these few questions - it will really help you.
So the thought I want to take you away today is before you automate the process, remember:
first you need to improve it and optimize it, and only then automate it.
And if it helps you, remember this quote from Bill Gates:
"Automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency;
automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency."
Now that you've determined what process changes are required to make it more optimal and more efficient,
you need to capture those requirements.
This is where your business analysis skills of documenting requirements
and presenting requirements in different ways will come in handy.
You may start with capturing "as is" and "to be" process flows, where ideally you want to highlight
what's different or new, or change it to make it very clear.
You will always need to include more detailed requirements. Process flow or diagram by itself is not enough.
You may need step descriptions, narratives, business rules that are behind those decisions.
You may need some details about inputs and outputs.
And then for complex processes, you may need to add different ways of depicting these complexities.
Think scenario matrices to describe a variety of scenarios that may happen in this process.
Perhaps you have conditions that create multiple outcomes.
A decision tree or a decision table may help to show that.
And if you have a lot of sub-flows, then you may want to create a high-level flow.
And then special diagrams for each sub-flow.
There are many more business analysis techniques you can use if you're interested.
Check out my webinar recording, "Business Analysis Tool and Techniques."
But just remember, creating multiple views is always helpful, especially when you are changing a complex process.
If you'd like to explore more, there's quite a few disciplines that exist today:
Business Process Re-engineering, Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, SIPOC Analysis,
and for really advanced tools, check out the ideas about Next-Best-Action
- where you use analytics to determine the next process steps -
and Process Mining, that helps you to really understand the current process that runs today,
rather than what people say it is.
This is it for today! I hope that was useful for you.
I hope you found some ideas about process analysis you can apply in your job.
For more information, visit my website why-change.com or check out my book,
"Business Analyst: A Profession and a Mindset."
Thank you for spending this time with me, watching this video.
Until next time!