How Business Process Mapping Saved an It Project

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IIR BPM Conference 2007

Case Study: How Business ProcessMapping Saved an IT Project

Garrett HunterDirector, Information Technology

Sony Pictures [email protected]



IIR BPM Conference 2007 2

Sony StudiosCulver City , CA

Sony Pictures

HomeEntertainment

Sony Pictures Television and Netw orks Sony Pictures Digital

Sony Pictures Entertainment's global operations encompass motionpicture production and distribution, television programming andsyndication, home video acquisition and distribution, operation of

studio facilities, development of new entertainment technologies anddistribution of filmed entertainment in 67 countries worldwide. SonyPictures can be found on the World Wide Web at sonypictures.com

Motion Pictures Group

http://www.sonypictures.com/

http://www.sonypictures.com/

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http://www.axn-asia.com/default.asp

http://www.rulesofengagement-tv.com/index.php

http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/thepursuitofhappyness/index.html

http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/idreamofjeannie-season4/index.html

http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/perfectstranger/index.html




Case Study Summary

• Explore how combining business process mappingtechniques with use case development helped to successfully

deliver an IT project• Review how industry bodies of knowledge such as the

Business Process Model Notation specification and the APQCProcess Framework were leveraged to provide a commonbusiness process vocabulary for both the IT team and thebusiness customers


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Case Study Key Issues

• Explaining what a workflow is to business

• Translating workflows into system requirements

• Helping our business customers agree on the process

• Why "Good Enough" is OK



Project Background

• The “Automated System for Ad/Pub Fulfillment” was to

manage the fulfillment of marketing materials for allinternational offices & agents

• Marketing materials – T-Shirts

– Keychains

– One Sheets

– And anything else amarketer can imagine



Project Background – Scope

• Primary stakeholders were interviewed to determine systemfeatures

– Online shopping Cart – Product Master

– Receiving

– Inventory Management• Additional interviews were conducted with users to generate

use cases for system configuration and customization

• The new system would be replacing processes executed withspreadsheets, email, and paper – Manually intensive processes



Project Background – Delivery Methodology

• Scope and features were defined in an unstructurednarrative style

– High level business modeling included via flowcharts• Use cases were used to define development requirements

– A use case documents the step by step actions a user

performs to complete a specific activity• Majority of rigor placed upon developers to produce class

diagrams and data models



Project Background – Primary Deliverables

Use Cases

DiagramsNarrative

Flow Charts



Missed Requirements

• After several months of analysis and development, the firstrelease date was missed because the customer would notsign off on the system stating “IT does not understand ourbusiness”

• Further analysis revealed multiple requirements that weremissed because business rules were not explored in depth – Process for assigning order fulfillment was more complicated

than initially thought

– The number & complexity of business rules wasunderestimated



Short Term Corrective Steps

• Focused on modeling the end-to-end business processes tobetter understand what we were missing

• Conducted Bi-weekly meetings with customer to map theirprocesses – Helped to both rebuild credibility & capture an accurate

understanding of all business rules

– Required the project to determine how much was “enough” detail to capture

• Started the process for defining a long term solution toensure we would do better at understanding the businessproblem




Process Mapping Success

• Able to describe the exact steps our customer performed aspart of their work

– This allowed us to better empathize with their currentchallenges and demonstrate our intent to deliver a usablesystem

• Able to call out specific areas within the application thatneeded customization and which steps would be automated

• Customer VP personally expressed his gratitude that “ITfinally understands what we have to go through”




Tips for Ensuring Success

• Get them all in the same room / on the same call

• Focus on the person actually performing the work

– Not their supervisor / boss

• Get agreement on the start and end points of the process – Helps to set the scope of the process mapping

• Get agreement on the inputs & outputs – Critical to finding all handoff points and involved parties

• Be transparent, show them your models




Long Term Corrective Steps

• Create guidelines on how to link business processes tosystem requirements

– Traceability is a powerful control to ensure the team isdelivering what the customer expects

• Develop business modeling as a discipline and not abyproduct – Traditionally, we emphasized delivering coding requirements &

not process requirements

• Expand Our business modeling to include the entire businessprocess, end-to-end, and not just discrete steps along theway – Focus on automation objectives rather than coding

requirements




Creating a set of Guidelines

• Projects were using numerous tools and diagrammingtechniques to document business process models

– Quality of deliverables too dependent on the whims of theanalyst

• Needed an approach that would appeal to the widestaudience

• Needed something that was widely understood outside of Sony Pictures

• It needed to be compatible with our current developmentmethodology based on use cases




Diagramm ing Candidates

• The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)specification

– Sponsored by the Object Management Group, it offered a wayto standardize our diagrams

– Notation similar to our existing use of swim lane / workflowdiagrams

• Unified Modeling Language (UML)

– The standard in object oriented development it offered anumber of related models for developing requirements

– Activity diagrams closest to what we would need




A Best-of-Breed Solution

• BPMN offered the best combination of flexibility andstandardization to link process models to software design

– Standardized diagram symbols – Required the “who” in each diagram

– Easily understood by non-techies (for the most part)

– Already had BPM systems in house using the notation• UML proved to be too focused on software development and

required more training to educate the end consumer

• We would add additional notations such as inputs & outputs – Borrowed from IDEF0




A Best-of-Breed Solution

• Use cases would be derived from specific process steps andcontinue to form the basis for system requirements

• Data models would be driven by inputs & outputs from theprocess diagrams

• We would create a process modeling style guide that wouldconnect all the pieces together




BPMN from the Start

• Project analysis would begin with a Level 1 process diagramusing the BPMN 1.x specification

– Short list of core graphical elements meant a short learningcurve

– Just the core set of elements for our initial release were used




Business Modeling as a Discipline

• Using BPMN we started at a macro level and methodicallydecomposed any step in the process that was unclear

• Divided into three levels, increasing in detail – Level 1 = Handoff Level

– Level 2 = Milestone Level

– Level 3 = Logic / Task Level• We took our guidance from the book Workflow Modeling:

Tools for Process Improvement and Application Development

(A. Sharp, P. McDermott, Artech House, Inc. 2001)• This rigor enabled the team to document the processes

without becoming lost in unnecessary details




Level 1 – Handoffs

• Map enough of the processes to understand what we missed – Keeps us focused on what happens

• Start at a level where you can focus strictly on the handoffsbetween people participating in the process

Ad/Pub Packer

Ad/Pub Picker

Ad/Pub Distribution

Customer Sales & Service Rep

International Marketing

Aprimo Order Report

«printed» DistributionList

«standing order» S hipping Notice

Work Order

«printed»Distribution List

«printed» Distribution Lis t

«email» Shipment Priorities

« pr i n t e d »D i s t r i b u t i onL

Picked Order

« pr i n t e d »W

or k Or d er

«global promotion» Shipping Notice4.4.3.1.1

Create DistributionList

4.4.3.1.5Pick Order

4.4.3.1.6Pack Order

F

1 Organize daily service order fulfillment schedule

Explored in Level 2




Level 2 – M ilestones

• Next we selected a process step & focused on documentingmilestones within that step

– Illustrates decisions that affect the flow in a significant way• The process shown here is derived from a single step


Ad/Pub Receiver

N o

Yes

Yes

N o

R e c e

i v i n g

R e p o r t

Aprimo OrderReport

«standing order»

Shipping Notice

«global promotion»Shipping Notice

4.4.3.1.1.4Validate

quanity-on-handsatisfies quantity

ordered

4.4.3.1.1.6Update item

quantities on eachorder

4.4.3.1.1.7Ass ign HOLD to w orkorders that cannot be

shipped

enough onhand?

4.4.3.1.1.5Split Work Order

partialshipment?

4.4.3.1.1.3Create Shipping

List from StandingOrder Template

4.4.3.1.1.2Create ShippingList from Global

PromotionsTemplate

4.4.3.1.1.1Create Shipping

List from PremiumOrders

1.1 Create Distribution List

Explored in Level 3




Level 3 – Logic / Tasks

• Depending on complexity we would further break down eachstep to get to the how

– This is the first time we get to the procedural level• This level of modeling maps closely to the steps within a use

case

• Naming convention tells the reader this was derived from ahigher level model


Publicity

Aprimo OrderReport

Publicity

4.4.3.1.1.4Validate

quanity-on-handsatisfies quantity

Create ShipMa ster from

Premium ItemsXLS tempalte

Apply Countryshipping rules

Add Cou ntry andCode to Shippin g

List

Add i tem ordersto Shipping L ist

1.1.1 Create Shipping List from Premium Orders




Process Step Nam ing Conventions

• Avoid using ambiguous terms such as process or manage – The diagram being created is the process

• Always use a verb – noun combination – Create distribution list

– Pick order

– Pack order

• Use only one verb at a time – Using multiple verbs can hide your meaning an complicate the

diagram




Connecting to System Requirements

• Our process diagrams became the agreement (akarequirements) between project and our customer

– Each step in the process diagram had the potential to be a usecase

• Use cases continued to be the requirements betweenbusiness analyst & developer

• Use case packages (in keeping with UML) were driven byhow we organized our proess models




A Style Guide to Bind Them All

• To be truly successful this needed to be a sustainableprocess

• Tool agnostic process modeling style guide developed toreduce complexity by limiting which elements from theBPMN spec would be used – Our team lacked experience modeling processes and needed

guidance before descending into analysis paralysis

• Topics covered include – Acceptable graphical elements

– Diagram naming conventions

– Process step naming conventions

b l




Process Foo

StartStep 1

Deliverable

Step 2

Input Step 3 EndOutput

Traceability

USE CASE

Basic Flow1.Do this2.Do that3.Stop here

A c

t o r 1

Data Models

Process Models

E l i i O A h h C




Explaining Our Approach to the Customer

• Never used technical terms such as BPMN, use case, oractivity diagram

• Interchangeably called our BPMN diagrams “process maps”, “workflow diagrams”, and “process models”

• Explained the diagrams as step-by-step pictures of who in

their organization does what• Kept the diagrams as uncluttered as possible to keep the

discussions focused on the work being performed

B i P A R l D i




10/ 22 11/ 2611 /1911 /1211 / 510 /2910 /151 0 / 81 0 / 1 10/ 22 11/ 2611 /1911 /1211 / 510 /2910 /151 0 / 81 0 / 1

Release 1.4.0 (Clients)

Release 1.5.0 (Work Orders)

Release 1.6.0 (Pick / Pack & Logistics)

Business Process As Release Driver

Ad/Pub Packer

Ad/Pub Picker

International Logistics

Shipping

Ad/Pub Distribution

CSS Management


Aprimo Order Report

«printed» DistributionList

«standing order» Shipping Notice

Distribution List w/o Hold &Domestic

Work Order

«printed»Distribution List

«printed» Distribution List

«email» Shipment Priorities

CSV Summary List

« pr i n t e d »D i s t r i b u t i onL i s t

Packed Order

Picked Order

« pr i n t e d »W

or k Or d er

«global promotion» Shipping Notice4.4.3.1.1

Create DistributionList

4.4.3.1.7Create Shipping

Order

4.4.3.1.8Ship Order

4.4.3.1.5Pick Order

4.4.3.1.6Pack Order

W h i “G d E h” OK?




W hen is “Good Enough” OK?

• Good enough is OK when… – Lives are not at risk

– Financial statement accuracy is not at risk – Business processes are vaguely defined

– The business is undergoing radical change

• The very act of implementing a new system and automatingnumerous manual processes would change the business inways we could not predict – Better to release early and often if possible

O g i d B li th M d l




Organize and Baseline the M odels

• We used the APQC Process

Classification Framework to organizeour business processes

• The taxonomy provided us a

structure to catalog each processsuch that we could baseline themagainst other business units withinSony Pictures – For example, the distribution of DVDs

in our Home Entertainment division © 2006 APQC (www.apqc.org)

After Applying the APQC PCF




After Applying the APQC PCF

• 4.0 Deliver Products and Services – 4.4 Deliver Product Service to Customer

• 4.4.3 Provide the service to specific customers – 4.4.3.1 Organize daily service order fulfillment (Level 1)

– 4.4.3.1.1 Create Distribution List (Level 2)

– 4.4.3.1.1.1 Create Shipping List from Premium Orders (Level 3)

• Notice the concept of levels is subjective

– This challenge never goes away – Always important to pick your perspective and be consistent

Benefits of a Classification System




Benefits of a Classification System

• Standardizing process names enables us to compareprocesses across the enterprise

• Enables us to see repeating patterns across businessdivisions

• Helps to normalize technology portfolios by consolidatingsystems when possible

• Allows us to compare ourselves to external organizations

The Live System




The Live System

References




References

• Sharp, A. & McDermott, P. Workflow Modeling: Tools for Process Improvement and Application Development , ArtechHouse, Inc. 2001

• BPMN 1.0 , BPMI.org, 2004, Object Management Group,2006, ( www.bpmn.org )

• Rational Unified Process , IBM, 2006 ( www.ibm.com/rational )

• National Institute of Standards and Technology, Integration Definition For Function Modeling (IDEF0) , NIST FIPSP183,1993 ( http://www.itl.nist.gov/fipspubs/idef02.doc )

• APQC, APQC Process Classification Framework v4.0.0 , APQC,2006 ( www.apqc.org )

http://www.bpmn.org/

http://www.ibm.com/rational

http://www.itl.nist.gov/fipspubs/idef02.doc

http://www.apqc.org/

http://www.apqc.org/

http://www.itl.nist.gov/fipspubs/idef02.doc

http://www.ibm.com/rational

http://www.bpmn.org/

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How Business Process Mapping Saved an It Project