How business process mapping saved an IT project.

Enabling your limitless growthEnabling your LIMITLESS growth
CASE STUDY: HOW BUSINESS PROCESS
MAPPING SAVED A SOFTWARE PROJECT
Garrett Hunter
garrett.hunter@blacktower.com
© 2013 Blacktower, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Case Study Summary
• Explore how combining business process
mapping techniques with use case development
helped to successfully deliver an IT project
• Review how industry bodies of knowledge such
as the Business Process Model Notation
specification and the APQC Process Framework
were leveraged to provide a common business
process vocabulary for both the IT team and the
business customers
© 2013 Blacktower, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 2

Case Study Key Issues
• Explaining what a workflow is to business
• Translating workflows into system
requirements
• Helping our business customers agree on the
process
• When to make decisions vs. asking questions

Project Background
• The Publicity System was to
manage the fulfillment of
marketing materials for all
international offices & agents
• Marketing materials
– T-Shirts
– Keychains
– Posters
– And anything else a marketer
can imagine

Project Background – Scope
• Primary stakeholders were interviewed to determine
system features
– Online shopping Cart
– Product Master
– Receiving
– Inventory Management
• Additional interviews were conducted with users to
generate use cases for system configuration and
customization
• The new system would be replacing processes
executed with spreadsheets, email, and paper
– Manually intensive processes

Project Background – Delivery
Methodology
• Scope and features were defined in an
unstructured narrative style
– High level business modeling included via flowcharts
• Use cases were used to define development
requirements
– A use case documents the step by step actions a user
performs to complete a specific activity
• Majority of rigor placed upon developers to
produce class diagrams and data models

Project Background – Primary Deliverables
Use Cases
DiagramsNarrative
International AdPub “T0-BE” Level 1 Process
Enter new items
in support of
Theatrical
release
Marketing
System
E-mail to territories
Requesting
Order
E-mail to territories
Requesting
Order
Marketing
Manual
Territories
order
Through
shopping cart
P.O. is placed
With vendor
Marketing Finance
System
Sales order
generated
WPF
System
Vendor produces
And inventories
product
Vendor produces
And inventories
product
Vendor
System
Vendor generates
shipment
Vendor generates
shipment
Vendor
System
Direct
Shipment?Yes
Vendor
Ships to
Territory
Vendor
System
Vendor ships to
WPF facility
Vendor ships to
WPF facility
Vendor
System
No
WPF
receives
WPF
System
Direct
Shipment?
Sales order
Place at Vendor
Facility
Sales order
Place at Vendor
Facility
Yes
Territories
System
Sales order
Placed at WPF
facility
Sales order
Placed at WPF
facility
No
WPF
System
WPF
Ships to
territories
WPF
System
Territories
Receive
product
Territories
Manual
Possible Interfaces
· GPMS
· Picasso
· Spend & Committed
· Carrier API
GAPS to date
· Shopping cart
(optional)
· Vendor PickPack,
Ship (optional)
· Transfer order
(optional)
· In-transit (optional)
· Location
management
· ApparelFootwear
ordering template
(e.g. Style, Color,
Size)
· Standing order
functionality
· Shipment status in
application, not a link
· Ability to change ship
from(s) and quantities
(optional)
· E-mail alerts
· Add other fields (e.g.
Title)
Questions
· Are items designated
as direct of non-
directs?
· Does Bluebird ship
direct and non-
directs?
International Lines of
Business (LOB’s)
Theatrical AdPub
TV spots
Home Entertainment
Print Services
Outside of Inwood
Flow Charts

Missed Requirements
• After several months of analysis and development, the
first release date was missed because the customer
would not sign off on the system stating “IT does not
understand our business”
• Further analysis revealed multiple requirements that
were missed because business rules were not explored
in depth
– Process for assigning order fulfillment was more
complicated than initially thought
– The number & complexity of business rules was
underestimated

Short Term Corrective Steps
• Focused on modeling the end-to-end business
processes to better understand what we were missing
• Conducted Bi-weekly meetings with customer to map
their processes
– Helped to both rebuild credibility & capture an accurate
understanding of all business rules
– Required the project to determine how much was
“enough” detail to capture
• Started the process for defining a long term solution to
ensure we would do better at understanding the
business problem

Process Mapping Success
• Able to describe the exact steps our customer
performed as part of their work
– This allowed us to better empathize with their current
challenges and demonstrate our intent to deliver a
usable system
• Able to call out specific areas within the
application that needed customization and which
steps would be automated
• Customer VP personally expressed his gratitude
that “IT finally understands what we have to go
through”

Tips for Ensuring Success
• Get them all in the same room / on the same call
• Focus on the person actually performing the work
– Not their supervisor / boss
• Get agreement on the start and end points of the
process
– Helps to set the scope of the process mapping
• Get agreement on the inputs & outputs
– Critical to finding all handoff points and involved parties
• Be transparent, show them your models

Long Term Corrective Steps
• Create guidelines on how to link business processes to
system requirements
– Traceability is a powerful control to ensure the team is
delivering what the customer expects
• Develop business modeling as a discipline and not a
byproduct
– Traditionally, we emphasized delivering coding requirements &
not process requirements
• Expand Our business modeling to include the entire
business process, end-to-end, and not just discrete steps
along the way
– Focus on automation objectives rather than coding
requirements

Creating a set of Guidelines
• Projects were using numerous tools and
diagramming techniques to document business
process models
– Quality of deliverables too dependent on the whims
of the analyst
• Needed an approach that would appeal to the
widest audience
• Needed something that was widely understood
outside of The Company
• It needed to be compatible with our current
development methodology based on use cases

Diagramming Candidates
• The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)
specification
– Sponsored by the Object Management Group, it offered a
way to standardize our diagrams
– Notation similar to our existing use of swim lane /
workflow diagrams
• Unified Modeling Language (UML)
– The standard in object oriented development it offered a
number of related models for developing requirements
– Activity diagrams closest to what we would need

A Best-of-Breed Solution
• BPMN offered the best combination of flexibility and
standardization to link process models to software design
– Standardized diagram symbols
– Required the “who” in each diagram
– Easily understood by non-techies (for the most part)
– Already had BPM systems in house using the notation
• UML proved to be too focused on software development
and required more training to educate the end consumer
• We would add additional notations such as inputs &
outputs
– Borrowed from IDEF0

A Best-of-Breed Solution
• Use cases would be derived from specific process
steps and continue to form the basis for system
requirements
• Data models would be driven by inputs & outputs
from the process diagrams
• We would create a process modeling style guide
that would connect all the pieces together

BPMN from the Start
• Project analysis would begin with a Level 1 process
diagram using the BPMN 1.x specification
– Short list of core graphical elements meant a short
learning curve
– Just the core set of elements for our initial release were
used

Business Modeling as a Discipline
• Using BPMN we started at a macro level and methodically
decomposed any step in the process that was unclear
• Divided into three levels, increasing in detail
– Level 1 = Handoff Level
– Level 2 = Milestone Level
– Level 3 = Logic / Task Level
• We took our guidance from the book Workflow Modeling:
Tools for Process Improvement and Application
Development (A. Sharp, P. McDermott, Artech House, Inc.
2001)
• This rigor enabled the team to document the processes
without becoming lost in unnecessary details

Level 1 – Handoffs
• Map enough of the processes to understand
what we missed
– Keeps us focused on what happens
• Start at a level where you can focus strictly on
the handoffs between people participating in
the process
Publicity
Global Promotions
Ad/Pub Packer
Ad/Pub Picker
International Logistics
Ad/Pub Distribution
CSS Management
Customer Sales & Service Rep
International Marketing
Aprimo Order Report
«printed» Distribution
List
«standing order» Shipping Notice
Distribution List w/o Hold &
Domestic
Work Order
«printed»
Distribution List
«printed» Distribution List
«email» Shipment Priorities
CSV Summary List
«printed»DistributionList
Picked Order
«printed»WorkOrder
«global promotion» Shipping Notice
P
4.4.3.1.1
Create Distribution
List
4.4.3.1.7
Create Shipping
Order
4.4.3.1.5
Pick Order
4.4.3.1.6
Pack Order
F
G
1 Organize daily service order fulfillment schedule
Explored in Level 2

Level 2 – Milestones
• Next we selected a process step & focused on
documenting milestones within that step
– Illustrates decisions that affect the flow in a
significant way
• The process shown here is derived from a
single step
Outside Vendor
Ad/Pub Picker
Global Promotions
Publicity
Ad/Pub Receiver
No
Yes
Yes
No
ReceivingReport
Aprimo Order
Report
«standing order»
Shipping Notice
«global promotion»
Shipping Notice
4.4.3.1.1.4
Validate
quanity-on-hand
satisfies quantity
ordered
4.4.3.1
Group & S
orde
4.4.3.1.1.6
Update item
quantities on each
order
4.4.3.1.1.7
Assign HOLD to w ork
orders that cannot be
shipped
enough on
hand?
4.4.3.1.1.5
Split Work Order
partial
shipment?
Publicity
Fulf illment
Clerk
Gobal
Promotions
4.4.3.1.1.3
Create Shipping
List from Standing
Order Template
4.4.3.1.1.2
Create Shipping
List from Global
Promotions
Template
4.4.3.1.1.1
Create Shipping
List from Premium
Orders
1.1 Create Distribution List
Explored in Level 3

Level 3 – Logic / Tasks
• Depending on complexity we would further
break down each step to get to the how
– This is the first time we get to the procedural level
• This level of modeling maps closely to the
steps within a use case
• Naming convention tells the reader this was
derived from a higher level model
Publicity
Aprimo Order
Report
Publicity
4.4.3.1.1.4
Validate
quanity-on-hand
satisfies quantity
Create Ship
Master from
Premium Items
XLS tempalte
Apply Country
shipping rules
Add Country and
Code to Shipping
List
Add item orders
to Shipping List
1.1.1 Create Shipping List from Premium Orders

Process Step Naming Conventions
• Avoid using ambiguous terms such as process or
manage
– The diagram being created is the process
• Always use a verb – noun combination
– Create distribution list
– Pick order
– Pack order
• Use only one verb at a time
– Using multiple verbs can hide your meaning an complicate
the diagram

Connecting to System Requirements
• Our process diagrams became the agreement (aka
requirements) between project and our customer
– Each step in the process diagram had the potential to be a
use case
• Use cases continued to be the requirements
between business analyst & developer
• Use case packages (in keeping with UML) were
driven by how we organized our process models

A Style Guide to Bind Them All
• To be truly successful this needed to be a sustainable
process
• Tool agnostic process modeling style guide
developed to reduce complexity by limiting which
elements from the BPMN spec would be used
– Our team lacked experience modeling processes and
needed guidance before descending into analysis paralysis
• Topics covered include
– Acceptable graphical elements
– Diagram naming conventions
– Process step naming conventions

Process Foo
Actor2Actor1
Start
Step 1
Deliverable
Step 2
Input Step 3 EndOutput
Traceability
USE CASE
Basic Flow
1. Do this
2. Do that
3. Stop here
Process Foo.Step 1
Actor1
Input
Start
EndStep 1.1 Step 1.2 Deliverable
Data Models
Process Models

Explaining Our Approach to the Customer
• Never used technical terms such as BPMN, use
case, or activity diagram
• Interchangeably called our BPMN diagrams
“process maps”, “workflow diagrams”, and
“process models”
• Explained the diagrams as step-by-step pictures
of who in their organization does what
• Kept the diagrams as uncluttered as possible to
keep the discussions focused on the work being
performed

10/22 11/2611/1911/1211/510/2910/1510/810/1 10/22 11/2611/1911/1211/510/2910/1510/810/1
Release 1.4.0 (Clients)
Release 1.5.0 (Work Orders)
Release 1.6.0 (Pick / Pack & Logistics)
Business Process As Release Driver
Global Promotions
Ad/Pub Packer
Ad/Pub Picker
Shipping
Ad/Pub Distribution
CSS Management
Aprimo Order Report
«printed» Distribution
List
«standing order» Shipping Notice
Distribution List w/o Hold &
Domestic
Work Order
«printed»
Distribution List
«printed» Distribution List
«email» Shipment Priorities
CSV Summary List
«printed»DistributionList
Packed Order
Picked Order
«printed»WorkOrder
«global promotion» Shipping Notice
4.4.3.1.1
Create Distribution
List
4.4.3.1.7
Create Shipping
Order
4.4.3.1.8
Ship Order
4.4.3.1.5
Pick Order
4.4.3.1.6
Pack Order
F
G

When to Make Decision Unilaterally
• A leader sometimes needs to make decisions
– Lives are not at risk
– Financial statement accuracy is not at risk
– Business processes are vaguely defined
– The business is undergoing radical change
• The very act of implementing a new system and
automating numerous manual processes would
change the business in ways we could not predict
– Better to release early and often if possible

Organize and Baseline the Models
• We used the APQC Process
Classification Framework to
organize our business processes
• The taxonomy provided us a
structure to catalog each process
such that we could baseline
them against other business
units within The Company
– For example, the distribution of
DVDs in our Home Entertainment
division
© 2006 APQC (www.apqc.org)

After Applying the APQC PCF
• 4.0 Deliver Products and Services
– 4.4 Deliver Product Service to Customer
• 4.4.3 Provide the service to specific customers
– 4.4.3.1 Organize daily service order fulfillment (Level 1)
– 4.4.3.1.1 Create Distribution List (Level 2)
– 4.4.3.1.1.1 Create Shipping List from Premium Orders (Level 3)
• Notice the concept of levels is subjective
– This challenge never goes away
– Always important to pick your perspective and be
consistent

Benefits of a Classification System
• Standardizing process names enables us to
compare processes across the enterprise
• Enables us to see repeating patterns across
business divisions
• Helps to normalize technology portfolios by
consolidating systems when possible
• Allows us to compare ourselves to external
organizations

The Live System

References
• Sharp, A. & McDermott, P. Workflow Modeling: Tools for
Process Improvement and Application Development, Artech
House, Inc. 2001
• BPMN 1.0, BPMI.org, 2004, Object Management Group,
2006, (www.bpmn.org)
• Rational Unified Process, IBM, 2006
(www.ibm.com/rational)
• National Institute of Standards and Technology, Integration
Definition For Function Modeling (IDEF0), NIST FIPSP183,
1993 (http://www.itl.nist.gov/fipspubs/idef02.doc)
• APQC, APQC Process Classification Framework v4.0.0,
APQC, 2006 (www.apqc.org)

About Blacktower, Inc.
• We provide management and technology
guidance to companies seeking to increase
operational efficiencies, implement new
software systems, and develop technology
strategies that better align their corporate
objectives to the market conditions.
• Contact us at limitless@blacktower.com to
find out how we can help you too.

How business process mapping saved an IT project.

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