Imagine you are responsible for the human resources department of a leading consultancy. Which characteristics would you check when hiring new process analysts?
While hiring new process analysts, one of the main deciding factors is the process modelling experience. Process analysts with profound knowledge of business process modelling techniques would be preferred. They should be familiar with languages like BPMN, be skilled in organizing information in terms of a process diagram and should be familiar with at least two process modelling tools.
In particular, process analysts should have expertise in three major areas:
1. Problem understanding – using the episodic knowledge available to get to the root of the problem and knowledge organisation to help structure the problem.
2. Problem solving –this includes trigger identification where problem related cues are found. Hypothesis management skills for formulation and testing of hypotheses. Having clear goal orientation and follow top down strategy driven by analysis goals.
3. Modelling skills– should be able to create well-structured and laid out models. The models should be systematically labelled with explicit start and end points of the process and should have appropriate granularity and decomposition.
The process analysts should have expertise to get the right people on board, identify patterns in the information provided by domain experts and pay attention to aesthetics.
Personality traits like conscientiousness and extraversion are very important factors to be considered while hiring new process analysts. Experiences relating to conscientious planning and co-ordination of interviews with domain experts in a limited time frame have to be considered. They should have experiences demonstrating their extraversion and positive energy.
Exercise 5.13 How would you as a process analyst prepare for an interview with a domain expert?
The challenges of process discovery, namely the fact that process knowledge is scattered across different domain experts, that domain experts typically think in terms of individual cases and that domain experts are often not familiar with business process modelling languages have to be taken into consideration while preparing for an interview with a domain expert. Process knowledge is fragmented due to specialization and division of labour; hence interviews have to be conducted with various domain experts involved in the process.
There are two strategies available for scheduling interviews: firstly starting backwards from the products and results of the products; secondly starting at the beginning by proceeding forward. Conducting interviews in a forward way permits to follow the flow of processing in the order of how it unfolds. People working in a process require a certain input to be available for conducting their work and the backward perspective makes it easy to consider what has to be achieved before a specific activity can be conducted. Both perspectives, the downstream and the upstream perspective are important when interviewing domain experts. The questions should be clear and provide direction regarding which input is expected from prior upstream activities, which decisions are taken and in which format the results of an activity are forwarded to which subsequent party.
Specific questions should be prepared to abstract instance level information from the domain experts to create general process model. Specific questions like what happens if some task is completed, what if certain conditions do or do not hold and what if certain deadlines are not met should be asked.
Need to prepare for sharing my own terminology and understanding the terminology that would be used by the domain expert. One recurrent pitfall of interviews is that when asked how a given process or activity is performed, the interviewee tends to describe the normal way of processing leaving aside the exceptional situations. Need to prepare questions that help in identifying exceptional behaviour. Questions like “How did you handle your most difficult customer?”, “What was the most difficult case you have worked on?” etc. can be asked. Having received input from all relevant domain experts, we need to make proposals for resolving inconsistencies, which again requires feedback and eventually approval of the domain experts.
Information is gathered through interviews and later organised offline before constructing an initial process model. As a consequence, interviewing domain experts is often conducted in many iterations. After the initial interview, the draft model needs to be created and then discussed with the domain expert for correctness and completeness. The domain experts may not be trained to read process models and seeking corrections will not be appropriate. Even when domain experts understand the activity labels well, they would often not understand the sophisticated parts of control flow captured in the model. Therefore, we need to explain the content of the process model in detail, for e.g. by translating the formal notation of the process model to a natural-language description with same meaning.
During feedback interview, it is important to ask what happens if something goes wrong or how unexpected cases are handled. In some cases, second feedback round will lead to approval otherwise a third feedback round is required for checking the reworked process model again.
The interview should be both structured as well as free-form. Domain experts feel more comfortable with free-form interviews where they can discuss the process at a level of detail that they find appropriate. We should maintain a checklist consisting relevant questions but we should not make the domain expert feel it because they may hold back important information that they are not explicitly asked for.