Business Process Analysis

Course Description

Business process analysis is a fundamental activity supporting critical change efforts, whether you are defining changes to existing business systems, improving your business processes, or acquiring, merging, or splitting business units. Every business is searching for better ways of getting work done. Improving efficiency, decreasing costs, increasing productivity and customer service are universal goals. Innovation and faster time to market is critical in today’s environment. Doing things the way they’ve always been done is comfortable but may hamper operational agility in the future. Successful business process improvement efforts must:

1. Study the current procedures
2. Find the core or essential work being done
3. Define how this essential work will be accomplished

Creating AS IS and TO BE workflows gives business analysts a strategic view of business architecture. This is essential in Agile, SOA, BPM, COTS, and any type of process improvement project. Workflows and Value Stream Maps are also the foundation for documenting Six Sigma and Lean improvement efforts.

This course provides students with techniques to examine how things are currently being done and create solution options that improve business processes.  It provides business analysts a tool for understanding core business processes so they can provide alternative solutions that meet key business needs and consider IT impacts. Management can then evaluate each alternative for its potential return on investment. Analyzing business processes may result in changes to software, policies, procedures, organizational structure, personnel, and more.

This course supports the standards outlined in the IIBA BABOK^® Guide V3.0. and teaches a proven approach which gives business analysts the confidence and credibility to recommend the right solution to address a business problem or opportunity.

Learning Objectives

• Practice a Framework for Process Improvement
• Initiate a process analysis effort with clear objectives and an agreed-upon goal.
• Identify and define complex business process steps using various modeling techniques such as ANSI, Swim Lane, Business Process Diagrams, UML, SIPOC, and Value Stream Maps
• Evaluate and prioritize potential improvements
• Identify the most important business component: Essential Processes
• Decompose complex processes into lower level tasks and sub-processes using a decomposition diagram.
• Identify changes, detail the impacts of each change, and develop a transition plan and backlog.
• Evaluate solution effectiveness

Intended Audience

This course will be beneficial to any person, in any size organization, hoping to improve their business processes. The techniques presented can be used without any sophisticated software to quickly identify areas for improvement and fix broken processes.

Prerequisites

We recommend that students first attend our Essential Skills for Business Analysis class or have experience in project scope definition, eliciting requirements from subject matter experts, and understanding how business requirements fit into the entire systems development effort.