Hi there

I was hoping I could get some help.   I am not a business analyst, but I have been charged with documenting the the current business processes in our company.  I have been reading extensively on all of the tools and mapping tools out there.

My problem is that these all seem to be for the purpose of leading to what a solution is and are all quite technical .  We are in the position where we know we will be converting to new IT systems. What I have to do is document the current processes so that we can go to vendors from a position of knowledge on what our processes are  ( they in turn are likely to do their own review).  I do not need to go down to the granular level ( screen shots)  as we will be buying an off the shelf solution with miminal tweaking intended.   What I am tring to find is a template of questions that you should ask people what you are documenting the systems.  I 'd like to have it as a prompt to me so that I can ensure I am gathering as much info as possible.  It is not a case of having to familiarise myself with the business as I am already on staff and understand the business.

If someone could point me in a direction that would be great.

Thanks very much

1. Order Taking (“Mary gets a call in the morning from our customers and writes their orders on 3-part (pink, blue and white) paper in the order book”)
2. Order Fulfilment (“At lunch time Joe takes the “pink copy” and picks the items in the warehouse”)
3. Order Shipping (“Max calls the Courier at 4pm for the urgent interstate orders; Joe drops the rest of the orders off at the Post Office on his way home”)
4. Order Invoicing (“Joe photo-copies the pink copy for his records and gives the updated pink copy to Mary for Invoicing”).
5. Order Payments (“Max checks the mail-box at the post office and gives all the received cheques and remittance advices to Joanna, who comes in on Wednesday and Fridays for recording payments and sending out reminder letters. Joanna is the boss’ sister”)

 I think it is really hard to come up with a checklist which can at the end ensure that you have documented all the possible use cases.

If I have to do it, I might start with asking the users or myself (if I have all the domain knowledge) about the current Business Process and will try to model it so that I know the flow of the information. Once I have the pictorial view, I can easily describe all the inputs, any processing which I need to do base on the information and the desired output I will get. 

Do note, If you are documenting your Legacy system and you want to suggest any change then you need to document AS-IS and TO-BE business models, this will help the vendors to actually know the required change and will eventually help you guys to quickly wrap up the work.

While modeling your business process, you can tag the processes or the transition between processes, this will help the readers to easily understand what is happening where. Let me know if you need any samples/help….

-- Riz