Weidong Xia ISM3153 BPA /Team project guideline/ Page 1 of 7

ISM 3153 – Business Process Analysis Professor Weidong Xia

Team Project Guidelines

The objective of the team project is to provide an opportunity for us to apply the concepts, frameworks, techniques and tools covered in class to analyze and redesign a real-world business process. It is intended to be an important learning by doing aspect of the class that enables us to do something that is substantive and makes what we covered in class meaningful and actionable. Try to exercise out-of-the-box thinking and let your practical issues and creativity guide your team project. Key elements of the project include:  identifying and selecting a process that will be analyzed and designed  mapping and scoping of the business process  modeling and analysis of the as-is business process  identifying improvement targets and developing innovative process changes (be able to

show the differences between as-is and to-be)  modeling and analysis of the to-be business process  conducting a brief feasibility study and making implementation alignment and change

requirements Deliverables of the team project include: project proposal, mapping and SOW report, as-is and tracking report, to-be and final report, and team presentation. For each report, please use a cover page including: project title, name of project team, list of team members' names, and date of submission. There are no specific limitations on the format and length of each report. When writing up your report, try to be creative, concise and complete. The process that you go through is as or even more important than the products you produce. It's critical that we learn something substantively through the process. I hope you can use the set of reports as templates for your future business process mapping, analysis and redesign projects. While doing your project, feel free to discuss with me any questions, concerns or problems you may encounter. I will be glad to read/discuss your work-in-process draft before the due date. Team project peer evaluation To ensure fair consideration of individual members’ efforts and contributions, a group peer evaluation will be conducted at the end of the course. The average peer evaluation score of a group member will be used as a weight to compute his/her individual project grade based on the overall group project grade. Please see the evaluation form at the end of this Guideline and

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on the Blackboard so that you can see what will be evaluated and that you can manage your effort accordingly. Completing the peer evaluation is required and will be considered as a part of the course participation grade. 1. Guidelines for team project proposal The team project proposal is an exercise of the identification and selection phase of the process analysis and redesign project lifecycle. In the proposal, each team member would identify an alternative project topic. Then as a team, list three to four criteria that your team uses to select one project topic among the alternatives (e.g., you may use a weighted project selection/decision matrix, with alternative project topics as columns, decision criteria as rows, allocate weight percentage to each of the criteria, scoring each alternative based on the criteria using 0 to 100 scale, select one project topic based the total weighted scores of the alternative projects). Once you have a selected project topic, provide basic background information. Please include but not limited to the following information in the proposal:

1. Name of your team and names of team members. 2. List of alternative team project topics, each team member propose a topic as a possible

team project topic choice. 3. List of project topic selection criteria. 4. Create a weighted project topic evaluation matrix. 5. Use the weighted project topic evaluation matrix to select the team project topic. 6. Brief description of selected project site

(1) Organization background information that may include name, location, number of employees, main businesses/markets, organization vision, mission, key performance metrics.

(2) Name of the process that will be analyzed. 7. Names of individuals who serve as data information sources for your team project

(maybe one of your team members or somebody in an organization your team has close relationship who is available and has access to the data/information you need).

Please use me as an extra team resource, feel free to send me your work-in-progress ideas/draft, call my cell when you have any questions, particularly during your team meetings, and I’ll be happy to join your team meetings. 2. Guidelines for team project mapping and SOW report

• Overall objectives of your team project • Organization background (can modify to provide more details based on your team

project proposal) – Organization information including name, location, number of employees, main

businesses/markets, and a brief history of the organization – Organization vision, mission, key performance metrics

• Organizational (or unit) goals, measures of each goal

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• Process background – Process name, location, business unit/function in which the process resides,

main purpose, approximate number of employees involved in the process • Specific definitions of the process

– Process components, inputs, outputs and other processes/systems/entities that the process interacts with

– Key process measures – Key improvement targets – Key issues/challenges

• Mappings of strategic goals and key business processes – Organizational (or unit) goals – Key processes that you are analyzing – How does each of the processes contributes to each organizational goal

• Team project planning (you can use MS Project to put together a quantitative SOW including WBS, OBS, RAM, schedule and deliverables)

3. Guidelines for team project as-is and tracking report

The purpose of the tracking report is to facilitate us to progress steadily on our team project. The tracking report should include but not limited to:

(1) Data/requirement gathering – Data gathering techniques that were used (e.g., Interviews, nominal group

techniques/focus group studies, survey, observations, documents), attached interview questions/survey questions/documents etc. as appendixes.

– Process narratives/stories (attach documents used/collected as appendixes) – Process definition and repository, data tables (similar to the IBM Holosofx BPIM

tutorial tables) (e.g., Resource components such as organization units, function, roles, external entities, external process; and process components such as processes, tasks, decision, choices, phi, connector media)

– Redesign objectives (process issues/problems/opportunities, specific measurement /improvement targets)

(2) Modeling current (as-is) process

– Use LucidChart.com to develop cross-functional workflow (we also call them swim lane) charts (as-is physical process modeling), may use multiple level diagrams based on process decomposition.

– Use LucidChart.com to develop data flow diagrams (as-is logical process modeling). First, develop context diagram, then level 0 diagram, followed by level 1 diagrams, etc.

– Use IBM BPIM to do process analysis and simulation (as-is process analytical modeling)

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 Use workflow charts and data flow diagrams as the reference bases to visualize process decomposition/process tree (e.g., different levels of process models)

 Modeling and validating each sub-process  Consolidate sub-processes into a high level process  Process analysis and simulation reports

• Performance metrics (e.g., cost, time, resources) • Process case analyses (e.g., bottleneck, gap) • Simulation analysis (e.g., bottleneck, gap) • Analysis reports (e.g., cost, time, resource, communications

– Process gaps/problems to be improved (Gaps/problems, redesign targets and alternatives)

(3) Project tracking and control

– Team project progress status and issues – (optional) Project tracking EVA (schedule variances, cost variances) for the

activities that were scheduled for the tracking period – Based on team project issues identified, make adjustments to your team project

baseline plan.

4. Guidelines for team project to-be and final report

(1) Identify alternative ideas for process redesign – Redesign ideas based on inputs from subjective matter experts (empirically data-

driven, inductive analytics) – Redesign ideas based on process redesign principles we discussed in class (be

specific about which ideas are derived from which redesign principles) (normatively theory-driven, deductive analytics)

– Redesign ideas derived from other sources/mechanisms (2) Modeling new logical (to-be) process

– Use LucidChart.com to develop cross-functional workflow (we also call them swim lane) charts (to-be physical process modeling). First, please make copies of your as-is cross-functional workflow charts files, name them to-be. Then, make changes on the to-be files to reflect your to-be redesign to the as-is business process.

– Use LucidChart.com to develop data flow diagrams (to-be logical process modeling). First, please make copies of your as-is data flow diagrams files, name them to-be. Then, make changes on the to-be files to reflect your to-be redesign to the as-is business process.

– Use IBM BPIM to do process analysis and simulation (to-be process analytical modeling), may make changes on copies of as-is IBM BPIM files.

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 Use workflow charts and data flow diagrams as the reference bases to visualize process decomposition/process tree (e.g., different levels of process models)

 Modeling and validating each sub-process,  Consolidate sub-processes into a high level process  Process analysis and simulation reports

• Performance metrics (e.g., cost, time, resources) • Process case analyses (e.g., bottleneck, gap) • Simulation analysis (e.g., bottleneck, gap) • Analysis reports (e.g., cost, time, resource, communications

(3) Impacts (benefits) analysis

– Differences in process measures between the as-is and the to-be processes (based on the IBM BPIM simulation result summary)

– Percentage improvements in process measures between the as-is and the to-be processes

– Use the process-goal mapping table in the Scoping/Mapping/SOW report to calculate the percentage changes expected in goal improvements.

– Calculated improvements in organizational (or unit) goals based on the percentage changes in goals derived from the process percentage changes.

(4) Feasibility and implementation plan (brief)

– Organizational alignment issues (tie back to the misalignment parts of the earlier reports, key success factors that need to be considered)

– Key process approaches for implementation (e.g., stages and activities, risk analysis, implementation control, change management, performance measures)

– Information systems implementation issues

(5) Your team’s own lessons learned through doing the project – Name top five most valuable things that you learned in doing the project – Name top five most important things that you own team would like to improve if

you were to do the project all over again

(6) Appendices (documents, tables, figures, charts, images, etc.)

5. Guidelines for team presentation

Each team will have 15 minutes for presentation and 5 minutes for Q&A. Since each project could be unique, you are free to decide what should be included in your presentation as well as the format of the presentation. But, limit the number of PowerPoint slides to no more than 18. Team project peer evaluation

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To ensure fair consideration of individual members’ efforts and contributions, a group peer evaluation will be conducted at the end of the course. The average peer evaluation score of a group member will be used as a weight to compute his/her individual project grade based on the overall group project grade. Please see the evaluation form at the end of this Guideline and on the Blackboard so that you can see what will be evaluated and that you can manage your effort accordingly.

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ISM 3153 – Business Process Analysis Professor Weidong Xia

Confidential Team Project Peer Evaluation

As we agreed at the beginning of the class, the purpose of the peer evaluation is to fairly reflect each individual team member’s contribution to the entire team project. The average team peer evaluation score of a team member will be used as a weight to calculate his/her individual project score based on the team project score. Completing the evaluation is required in order to receive a final grade for the course. This form will not be available to anyone but the instructor. When completing the form, please evaluate each of your teammates using a 0 to 100 scale (0 being the lowest and 100 being the highest) based on such criteria as on time completion of assigned responsibility, quality of work, and collegiality/teamwork spirit. Do not evaluate yourself. Team name: ________________________ Your name: ______________________________

Teammate Name On time completion of assigned responsibility (0-100)

Quality of work (0-100)

Collegiality / Teamwork spirit (0-100)

Overall contribution to the project (0-100)

Please name your evaluation form as 3153_LastName_FirstName_Peer.doc and submit your file on our class Canvas using Assignment Drop Box under “Team project peer evaluation”. If you have any comments/notes that will help better understand your peer evaluation or if you want to explain some specific team dynamics and issues, please write them down in additional page(s) in this file, and submit as part of the file. Thank you.