Hi Larry,

A process is the act of doing something to/with something. With that in mind you should be able to name all processes as a verb and a noun - doing something to something. You said "It begins with identifying the customer and ends with the customer purchasing a service" so you have at least 2 top level process steps of "identify customer" and "sell service". Inbetween you seem to have "research customer services", "meet customers", and afterwards "offer additional services".

You might want to start with a context diagram of some sort to scope the functional boundry of what you are analysing and then decompose the context in to processes at the level I suggested above.

Before progressing too much further with this though it would be good to know why you have been asked to do this in order to define what information you need to capture  - for example is it just processes that are required, or who is performing them as well, at what physical locations, using what tools and services and needing what data. What information is needed should be driven by why the model is being constructed.

By the way, there are some good free process modelling tools out there to help you capture and report on these processes - or do you already have a tool?

Hope this helps.

Guy

Hi Larry,

I'm glad you found my comments helpful.

"Maintain customer list" is verb and a noun so could be a process - however "maintain" is one of those catch-all words and what we are after is the reason why the list is being maintained and I guessed it was to identify customers. The actual words are not that important as the process specfication will define what the process actually does, but for clarity it would make sense to make for the process title to be as meaningfull as possible.

I can't really answer your questions about "pass of customer data" without knowing the context of the project...and I would suggest modelling that to define the functional scope anyway.

You said that the objective of this exercise is "to improve the processes" - how will you know that processes have been improved? What will you measure and what target do you need to reach? The reason I am asking is that this will guide what needs to be modelled not just functionally, but in terms of locations, organisation units, data requirements and tools.

Just so I know a bit better where you are coming from, what training/experience have you had in formal business analysis, and are you using any tools to model your requirements?

Guy