Business Process Modeling

Introduction

• What are business requirements? Why are they important?
• Review the requirements package
• What are the differences between business and functional requirements?
• Review the 7 characteristics of excellent requirements
• Review the 5 core requirements components

Identifying and Defining Essential Business Processes

• Learn to identify essential business processes. An essential business process is a core requirement of the business area necessary to provide the right solution deliverable. Each business process must be clearly defined, consistently named, and completely decomposed.
• Students are given a template to document this detailed information and learn to identify essential processes from a case study.
• Workshop: Learn to extract essential processes from real-world, detailed user description interview notes.
• Learn to use the process template as both an interviewing and documentation tool.
• Learn to look for redundant or reusable processes.

Process Analysis

• Learn to organize essential business processes in a process outline and decomposition diagram.
• Learn 3 major business process identification approaches and the situations in which each would work most effectively.
• Workshop: Students will use each approach to identify detailed processes from a case study.
• Top down
• Bottom up
• Event partitioning

Documenting Business Rules

• Learn the major types of business rules and why each one should be documented.
• Review data-related business rules as they are documented in an entity relationship diagram.
• Learn to detail business rules that involve both data and process components.
• Learn several techniques for documenting business rules.
• Learn to extract business rules from different sources.

Utilizing Workflow Analysis

• Learn to create detailed workflow diagrams using a number of techniques:
• ANSI standard flowchart
• Swimlane diagram
• Geographic diagram
• UML activity diagram
• Understand the benefits of each diagram to target each technique to a specific audience and need.
• Documenting AS IS vs. TO BE scenarios.
• Workshop: Perform workflow analysis for the case study.

Workshop: Maintenance Case Study

• Identify essential processes
• Build a decomposition diagram