Understanding the question
Before you decide on a solution to your business problem, you first need to understand the latter in detail. What are the needs of your customers? Where do your employees encounter problems? What are their risks? How can you increase your efficiency? In order to get answers to this question and to be able to find a suitable way for you, you must analyze and understand your company and the business environment in depth.
This is the broad field of business analysis in which we have been working for many years. With our specific analysis approach we focus on operational processes, business cases and operational decisions: process analysis. We believe that the work of the people involved in processes is the key to the optimal alignment and management of your company.
Strategic Management
Changes at the operational level require an understanding of the strategic direction of the company. For this purpose we apply the Business Motivation Model (BMM) from the Object Management Group (OMG). The model follows the following 6 basic ideas:
Business Perspective
All elements of the BMM have been developed from the business perspective. Before an enterprise begins to plan or implement individual activities, (IT) systems or similar, the basic ideas must be in the business plan definiert, which then serves as the basis for these further steps or business activities.
Motivation
The motivation in BMM is very central, the word itself is already contained in the name. The execution of a business process or the integration of a business rule should always be related to the vision or mission. It should be possible to answer why something is being done. All elements are interlinked and beeinflussen is the vision.
Reaction to change
Another fundamental assumption of BMM is that a company is not controlled by change but rather by how it reacts to change. The recognition of changes caused by Beeinflusser and their evaluation is central.
Separation of the concepts
A further basis is the separation of the concepts. So for example means and goals are strictly separated, since one can change for example the means without having to change thereby the goals. Or also Beeinflusser and the evaluation are separated, since changes of Beeinflusser are given, the evaluation of these are however different from person to person.
Splitting up
The BMM is transferable to all companies, regardless of their size. It is also possible to introduce the model in different departments/divisions of the company. The model is further structured in such a way that the elements of the different BMM can reference each other.
Key figures
Measuring performance is included in the BMM in the operational objectives. Thus, the model supports the measurability or the introduction of key figures in the company.
Business processes
According to the requirements on the granularity of the analysis of your business processes, we collect them descriptively or analytically in a suitable visual representation based on the OMG standard BPMN, as well as additional textual descriptions. We attach great importance to the accessibility of this documentation for your specialists, who can validate the jointly developed understanding. This is a central prerequisite for the assumption of process responsibility by the affected employees and the sustainability of the implemented changes.
Business Rules
While business processes describe how an organization handles or transforms business objects, definieren the business rules control this handling by providing the basis for decision points in the processes.
But what exactly is a business rule? A business rule is simply a rule within the responsibility of the business. The responsibility of the domain means that the domain can enforce, revise and abolish the rules as it sees fit. When we look at the Business Motivation Model's control loop, we see that agile management needs the ability to adapt business rules and business processes flexibel to changing conditions. A fine tuning of business rules must be easier and häufiger must be possible than a redesign of business processes, whose adaptation is often connected with a larger expenditure for the adaptation of IT systems.
For this reason, it is necessary to keep business rules and business processes separate. True agility requires that business rules are quickly and independently
can be adapted by the business processes. In addition, business rules affect many business processes. If the business rules are integrated into the business processes, they are mapped redundantly, which in turn increases the risk of inconsistencies. Each business rule should only be spezifiziert once. Such single-sourcing results in business rules being easier to finden and pflegen. We analyze and document business rules using DMN (Decision Model and Notation).
Business cases
Process management has been talking about business cases for a long time. The classical view, however, is that the processing of a business case is linear, that a known set of tasks in a predefined order is necessary and sufficient to complete the business case. However, this approach does not fit for a whole series of business cases. Namely, on the one hand, those in which business experts have to assess which path they have to take for optimal processing and, on the other hand, those in which different parties involved have the possibility (and not the task) of influencing the processing at any given time, or not.
This type of processing is also known as adaptive case management or event-driven processing. The analysis and description of this type of processing is currently not very common. However, CMMN (Case Management Model and Notation) is a method available to us, which we have already successfully used in several projects.
