As I conclude the discussion on the business process management perspective, let us look at how this perspective is related to the business analysis knowledge areas.
1 Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring: The focus of the business analysis work in business process management initiatives is the analysis and improvement of the business process.
Once that is completed, the technology used to support the process, and changes to the software applications should be reviewed.
The business process management initiatives involve continuous improvement activities, and these activities need to be continuously monitored.
2 Elicitation and Collaboration: for the success of the business process management initiative, the scope of the affected process must be described and understood.
To understand the process, the business analyst should focus on gathering information on the existing processes. The common elicitation techniques that are used are process modelling, process maps and stakeholder analysis.
As the existing process is changed, the process improvements effects on the organization, people, and technology should be analyzed.
These process changes can significantly affect the organization, so effective stakeholder management is significant or the process changes may not fulfill the organization’s goals and objectives.
3 Requirements Life Cycle Management: business process management initiatives are used to deliver value to the organization.
In order to deliver this value, there should be an analysis of the current process and based on the results of the analysis, changes might be made to the current processes.
To accomplish this the business analyst has to continuously collaborate with the stakeholders.
The activities on requirements life cycle management are important because they can lead to design, coding, implementation, and post-implementation changes.
4 Strategy Analysis: In a business process management initiative, strategy analysis is used to understand how the the affected processes are important to the enterprise value chain.
The current and future states should be considered to identify potential process changes. The continuous improvement techniques should be focused on using performance measures to decide on an effective strategy.
5 Requirements Analysis and Design Definition: the requirements analysis and design definition knowledge area is used to describe the future state process model.
The requirements architecture used in this future state model would include the process model, associated business rules and decisions, information requirements, and the organizational structure.
6 Solution Evaluation: the solution evaluation knowledge is used to identify opportunities for improvements.
Solution evaluation tasks are a recurring tasks that are usually used in business process management initiatives to evaluate the performance of the business process.
As processes are assessed for different scenarios, the results can be used to clarify the processes.
Solution evaluation tasks are also used to the understand the effect of process improvements and the value delivered by the business process change.
The business analysts can use process mining techniques to understand the impact of these changes and these techniques include analyzing the audit trails and transaction logs.
This analysis results can be used to investigate the variance between the potential and actual value and understand if a solution can be improved to realize more value.