DOQS REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING SERIES

Quality-Based Process Modeling

Quality-Based Process Modeling improves the completeness and thoroughness of business process definitions through a rigorous adaptation of techniques and concepts inherited from basic quality management practices. Using principles of customer-supplier and requirement-conformance feedback loops, process models create business definitions that can be easily verified and that reveal scope issues that normally create project problems during the implementation phase.

The increased rigor in quality-based process models allows a project’s full scope to be identified as early as possible on a project, allowing project and customer management to plan more effectively based on well-scoped facts about the business processes being analyzed.

This seminar explains how to define process models for information systems:

• Supplements traditional process modeling techniques with quality management techniques to identify scope omissions and ambiguities early in the project lifecycle; usually within the first few hours; allowing for better project estimate contracting and customer satisfaction.
• Cross-checking techniques provide real-time quality control of all working analysis models, preventing defects in one area of analysis from being carried into subsequent design activities. Because each technique in this seminar focuses on a slightly different perspective, individual defects are unlikely to remain hidden because it is unlikely that the same mistake would be introduced multiple times across multiple techniques.
• State transition path analysis allows separate independent sub-projects to be identified and isolated; reducing the time and effort required to continue through implementation with each piece. Critical portions of the project scope can then be moved to design earlier, with fewer resources required.
• Offers clear unambiguous criteria for analysts to know when to stop applying an analysis modeling technique to a problem. Productivity on traditional modeling projects isn’t low because analysts don’t know how to start modeling; it’s often low because they don’t know how and when to stop.

This seminar supports the broadest range of process analysis activities while avoiding the class pitfalls of analysis paralysis and spaghetti models usually associated with traditional process modeling techniques, models, and deliverables.

Seminar Rationale

Organizations practicing process modeling often find, even with the rigor supplied by the process models, they still fail to achieve many of the desired results. Changes of scope are still common throughout the downstream project life cycle, projects fail to integrate with each other in spite of the use of common process models, and the productivity benefits of modeling fail to materialize. This seminar emphasizes the addition of quality management principles to the process modeler’s toolkit to overcome the obstacles that prevent the modeling
effort from having its desired impact. Nowhere is this more true than in the avoidance of the complex data flow analysis that traditionally earns the reputation of being“spaghetti analysis.”

Seminar Uniqueness

Quality-Based Process Modeling does more than simply assure that the process models created by each analyst are of high quality. Providing for quality-driven process models that embed the concepts of
customer and supplier, requirement and conformance, and prompt and response, ensures that the analysis process enables and encourages business reengineering and improvement.

Topical Outline

• A FRAMEWORK FOR PROCESSES
  • Zachman’s Conceptual Levels
• DECOMPOSING THE ENTERPRISE
  • Criterion of Decomposition
  • Project Scoping Steps
  • Project Risk Assessment
• PROJECT DEFINITION
  • Context Data Flow
  • Requirements & Conformance Flows
  • Implied & Aggregate Requirements
  • Process Model Paradigm™
  • External Control Paradigm™
• PROCESS DECOMPOSITION
  • Data Flow Synchronization
  • Internal & Temporal Events
  • Data Stores & Junctions
  • Aggregate Process Paradigm™
• PROCESS DEFINITION
  • Initial & Final State Transitions
  • Sub-Project Independence
  • State-Data Flow Synchronization
  • Stand-Alone Event Paradigm™
• PROCESS SPECIFICATION
  • Pseudo-Code & Action Diagramming
  • Architecture Component Constructs
• EVOLUTION OF PROCESS MODELS
  • Customer-Supplier Integration