Analysing business processes - suggestions for the Business Analysis of workflow

There was a question about how to do a workflow analysis on the facebook group Back2ITSM and I thought that it might have more general interest for anybody needing to get involved with that sort of thing.

That's presupposing that there is a flow that's repeatable - which may, or may not, be the case.

If you're meaning a 'time & motion' study, or 'workflow analysis', there are a few different ways of looking at what needs to be done.

Time & Motion studies were all the rage in the '70s, my brother had a vac job doing them for Tongaat sugar company. They've now been subsumed under what's now called 'LEAN'. They're renamed 'method and time' studies. It's all, essentially, observation using clipboards and stop watches, or the modern equivalent, and ignoring findings in physics that suggest that measurement of something alters the thing measured.

There certainly is value in establishing what the flow is, if only to establish where there are wasteful loops that establish nothing, but have been traditional - like the finding, one day, in the British Army, that one of the chaps in an artillery battery was there to hold the horses, decades after the horses had ceased to be there.

One way of speeding up the discovery is to get the names and positions of all the people who authorise things (you'll be doing this for a bureaucratic company, sans doubt) and then interview them about their jobs - you can ask them about all the things they authorise, but the only important piece of intelligence is whether they've ever rejected anything - if they haven't then their authorisation is redundant and you've found a wasteful loop.

If you want to then document the flow of work that's evolved in an organisation over, perhaps, several decades, your best tool is probably something like SPICE - an electronic circuit diagram tool, very good at documenting rat's nests.

The tool that I use for a first approximation to such diagrams, in real life, is the most excellent 'dot' language, used to produce directed graphs - it's free (of course, as good stuff so often is) and you can learn about it and get to a download site from here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphviz

Everybody, I assumed, knew about this magnificently easy to use and powerful tool - but I've encountered lots of people who've only been exposed to the famous WeaklingGesture product from the evil empire and cannot believe that I can produce a good looking, fairly complex diagram in three or four minutes.

I often use my 'dot' files with Omnigraffle, because it's very good for the later stages.

If you're wanting to be more analytical and have flasher, more 'from the expert' looking pictures, then lots of people use UML that, like COBOL is meant to be as easy for managers to understand as techies - [hollow laugh]

I'd recommend, instead, using BPMN, which is less like a circuit diagram and much easier to work with - as well as being considerably more expressive. You can get free tools for it, but I happen to use something called 'Visual Paradigm' that's quite expensive, but works pretty well - as long as you don't expect any miracles from the support team in Hong Kong - http://www.visual-paradigm.com/whats-new/ get the free download and try it for a few days to see if it's your thing. The free tools are just as good, in many ways, but I didn't get on well with the X11 interface.

If you want to really get down to the nitty gritty - and I'd recommend leaving this until phase III when you're finally getting to understand things and have made some improvements, then the Open Group's Archi is free and very good (as long as you're not using it for anything commercial, in which case it's furiously expensive). http://www.archimatetool.com

I've attached a picture of the Adaptive Service Model (takingserviceforward.org/wiki ) that was produced in Archi to give the idea.

Oh, and don't believe any documents or diagrams that you're given that are claimed to explain the process, but smell like something ready for the British Museum rare documents team.

What is the value of nothing?

Is it true that nothing is actually free? I'm not sure - literally nothing, a vacuum, costs quite a bit to make - you can get it free in space, but travelling there costs quite a bit. So you can find costs that you may have to pay for anything, but forget sophistry.

If you have a choice of whether to use a 'free' piece of software,


The real secret is to make sure that the cost is not one of your requirements. Cost on its own doesn't mean anything. Is a Rolls-Royce expensive? (no, it's a lot cheaper than a lear jet). What's important is the TCO - the Achilles heel of many cloud services is that you have to keep paying for them in five years time, when software you've bought has had four years in which to amortise the initial cost.

Even more important is the value/cost ratio. Developing your own solution may seem extremely expensive compared to buying an off-the-peg software package, but, if you base your development on a rock-solid open-source platform, then the fact that your software has been developed exactly to fit your requirements should make it better than any generic offering. So your cost/value ratio, in the long term, means that your TCO is tiny.

Governance - Why the roles of Chair & CEO cannot, and must not, be combined.

Governance is not ideology, at least, it certainly should not be. It is a way, evolved over time in response to real-world disasters, and successes, of achieving the best results for all stakeholders.

That's the important bit 'all stakeholders'.

That includes the general public, the regulators, the suppliers, the customers and the staff - as well as the shareholders, the directors and senior employees, such as the CEO, CFO, and so forth.

The roles of CEO and Chair of the board, should never be combined, it's vital that they are different people to prevent the conflict of interest that exists between the two roles. I think it's worse than poor governance and ought to be illegal.

Before the idea of the impressive titles of CEO came about, there used to be 'managing directors' - directors who had the task of managing, as well as being part of the governance team. That worked quite well, but had its share of problems - as does everything else.
It's worth remembering that one of the arguments for fascism, its main appeal, actually, is that 'it works' - it gets the trains running on time and keeps the riff-raff off the streets. This in middle-class terms is ideal, which is why fascism has always had, and continues to have, such a great appeal.

A company run entirely by one person, whether CEO, Chair, MD, owner or some combination, is like that, it works... or, it fails.

That's because 'things get done', as in a fascist state, the word of one person is law.
The problem, as people have been noticing for a long time, is that 'it works' from just the perspective of shareholders, or just the perspective of the middle-class majority, or just the perspective of the share price or any individual measure, is not good enough.

It is not OK for a company to succeed by:

- Bullying its suppliers
- Bullying its customers
- Bullying its staff
- Ignoring regulators, laws, standards, safety etc.
- Bribing any combination of these
- Industrial espionage - yes, even competitors are stakeholder

These may all give the appearance of 'success', but are all, in fact, failures in the company as a human institution.

Governance is there to ensure that there are checks and balances to the skewed approach that results from only one person being in control.

Naturally, if it is a one man company, then only one person will be in control, and will prosper and suffer for his own errors or successes. Similarly for very small companies, the individual running it, or a collaboration, works, and the company succeeds, or fails, and it doesn't.

For a medium-sized or large company, this isn't good enough. As I said at the start, instead, governance is essential so that the best value is delivered to all stakeholders.
That's the perspective. Summed up in the idea that a company must be a good corporate citizen. Yes, it must make money for its shareholders, but also, it must obey the law, comply with standards, such as those for health and safety, and it must treat its suppliers, staff, customers fairly.

To achieve this, it is necessary to have a properly governed company, with the board governing, and the managers managing.

To give just one practical example:

Carly Fiorina was able to destroy Hewlett-Packard precisely because she was not only employed as CEO, but also put in the role of President of the Company and Chair of the board - there was nobody who could prevent the disaster. It was so bad that the HP board eventually sacked her - something that's almost unknown. If they'd just had her as CEO, the damage could have been contained and a strong chair might even have helped re-direct her to doing a proper job - I personally doubt that, because she was the wrong person for CEO, but it'd have been far less damaging than the disaster that it actually was.

Naturally, separating the roles doesn't prevent malfeasance, but it adds an extra bit of protection against it.