Larry,

Free process modellers can be had at http://www.tibco.com/devnet/business_studio/default.jsp and http://www.tibco.com/devnet/business_studio/default.jsp

A HUGE health warning though: if you have not had any formal training on Business Analysis then in all liklihood you will get in to an uncontrolled mess fast - just as I would if I tried to be a Project Manager! Developing process models in isoloation of the rest of the analytical elements you need to define means you have no way of justifying if each process and process step is necessary, what is in scope and what isn't, what would constitute an improvement, and so on.

At the very least you need to consider specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and "to die for" (SMART) objectives so that you KNOW what a successful review of this area will achieve - and they need to be agreed by all those who can kill your project. There is a lot to go through and get your head around - I would suggest you engage with a BA if you can (or get trained yourself) and if you cannot do either of those raise the risk of project failure to your sponsors based on the issue of lack of trained resources - if you don't and the project does not deliver then quite rightly you may end being responsible because you didn't raise the issue of what you NEED to progress this.

These comments are all with your best interests at heart and I hope they are useful.

Guy

Hi Larry,

Here are a few more thoughts for you:

I tend to agree with Guy that "Maintain Customer Data" is probably not a process.  Why?  You'll have to do some more detailed study on your own as to what is the definition of a business process, but in general a business process must have a clear business objective.  It's not clear to make what the business objective is for "Maintain Customer Data".   My gut feeling tells me that "Maintain Customer Data" is a task (or sub-process) but of a larger business process.  You should identify the high-level (aka key) business processes first. In addition, for each high-level business process you should be able to describe/define the process using a short paragraph (from the business perspective.

For example: "Originate Loan" is a business process in the mortgage industry.  The business derives value from this process because for every loan which is funded the business makes money.  The high-level definition might be like this: "Originate Loan" is the process (set of activities) by which a mortgage company interacts with prospective borrowers in order to provide them with a mortgage product which meets their specific need.

Since you are new and do not have a preference towards a given tool/methodology, I would suggest that you take a look at BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) as a way to model your business processes.

BPMN.org has the details on the specification and a number of useful articles and guides for using BPMN.

Also, take a look at Active Modeler as they provide a version of their tool for FREE.  Active Modeler supports BPMN.  Also, there is a stencil available for Microsoft Visio if you already use that tool within your organization.

- Adrian

Guy Beauchamp wrote 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

Comment 2

maintain Customer list would best be considerred an activity.  It's an event rather than something that takes time and passes through several stages.  As such it would be better caught in a functional decomposition than a process diagram.

A functional decomposition is where you break down all the higher level activities into detailed activities.  Things are not tied together in a sequence.  If you want an idea of what a functional decomposition looks like you can probably have a look at your orgnisational chart, as many organisatons are built arund functional units (that contribute to cross functional processes.)