Analysing the Process

Having defined the boundaries of the process you are about to analyse, it is time to take a sanity check and ensure that your project has a sponsor whose sphere of control covers all of the areas encompassed by the process. If your sponsor doesn't have sufficient political influence over all of the 'internal clients' involved you need to find another sponsor or narrow the scope of the project. The alternative is that your project team will spend a lot of time coming up with a proposal that is doomed to failure. Leadership is vital in ensuring that changes to business processes can actually be implemented.

Once you are clear that it is sensible for the project to proceed you can begin analysis. There are many process analysis models and tools available. This infoKit covers a few that are widely used and have been tried to good effect within the education sector. It is however worth remembering that all models are incomplete and represent a particular view or snapshot of a process. It may be that you need to apply a number of different models representing different perspectives and levels of abstraction before you develop an understanding of the issues that is helpful to you. Similarly, process analysis is an iterative activity. You will need to interview key participants in the process to build up a picture of activities and, having drawn up models, you will need to return to the stakeholders to verify that the models represent those activities accurately.

Process Decomposition

The process you have defined in broad terms now needs to be broken down to a level of detail that allows you to effectively understand and analyse the process. This activity is often termed 'process decomposition'. The process is likely to break down into:

• Major process

• Sub-processes

• Activities

When describing a process or sub process it is helpful to use the format:

verb + noun

e.g. Enrol Student

You will need to be clear about what you mean about each of the terms you use. It will be helpful to document your definition and confirm this with the stakeholders e.g. what do you mean by student? If there is a lack of clarity about the definition this may indicate the need to break the process down further. For example the process of enrolling a part time student or distance learner may be very different to the process for enrolling a full time student.

The diagram below shows an example of a process decomposition developed by an institution undertaking replacement of its student administration system. The team decided that the broad process under review was Administering Students and that it broke down into 10 major sub-processes. Each of these then broke down into a number of sub-processes with associated activities.