Project accelerator

Responsibility for the documentation (and up-to-dateness) of business processes is often held by a department with appropriately trained specialists, who often also have exclusive documentation rights for these corporate and IT processes. The consequences are clear: The up-to-dateness of the documented processes can hardly be ensured, or only with great effort.

Particularly in IT projects with a tight schedule, the acceptance of documenting new and/or adapted processes is a fortiori non-existent. The few hours that are jointly invested between IT and business in the design phase for the elaboration and clarification of the exact goals and expected results in a software implementation project, for example, are usually not sufficient for this.

IT is happy for every minute in which it can get back to dealing with the problems of ongoing day-to-day business, and the business department would prefer to be confronted with complicated IT issues as little as possible anyway.

Even though the above illustration may be somewhat polarizing, the fundamental problem remains: Both sides have little time in the project - and certainly not for the cumbersome and perceived unnecessary documentation of target processes.

But this does not have to be the case, according to Sirius' experience from numerous projects. Modern process tools such as the Signavio Process Editor can help. The tool is available as a SaaS cloud product or also as an on-premise solution on the company's own servers.

This means that process design phases can be designed more efficiently and with more intensive employee participation - and the knowledge carriers in the specialist areas can contribute changes and comments directly. And they can do so even if they did not participate in the actual design workshops, for example.

Improved communication in the project enables collaborative process design. Employees can also be involved in process documentation without prior knowledge and expensive training.

This is also advantageous because in the case of extensive processes, a lot of detailed knowledge is often distributed across several people or departments. Getting all the key people together here in face-to-face workshops is simply not feasible as a rule.

Sirius has been using the BPM tool in its SAP projects since the former start-up entered the market in 2009. As a "spin-off" of four former students of the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, there is still a certain closeness to SAP and so the company has a special treat in store for SAP customers:

With the free "Signavio for SAP Solution Manager Edition", SAP customers who have an SAP Solution Manager can use Signavio's basic process modeling functions for up to three modeling users, which is already completely sufficient for many cases in projects - because the so-called "collaboration users", i.e. employees who only view and comment on the created process models, are furthermore free of charge for an unlimited period of time.

Together with, for example, the Sirius IT reference model, a collection of predefined best-practice IT processes that have been continuously developed over the last ten years, project runtimes can be reduced.

Best practice procedure model

But how can the software now be used practically and successfully in a project with a tight schedule? First of all, a good modeling tool alone does not guarantee a successful IT software project.

For this reason, Sirius relies on a tried and tested process model in its projects, which combines classic project management standards with agile software development methods.

The figure shows the process model based on a design phase in which the target processes to be supported by the software solution are first developed in one or more design workshops with the customers.

Prefabricated best practice processes serve to accelerate and shorten the discussion. In the workshop itself, the project group can focus directly on the content. This is where one of Signavio's strengths comes into play:

The user interface is so easy and intuitive to use that it is even conceivable to "model" together directly in the tool during the workshop. Alternatively, the results of the discussion can first be recorded on a flipchart or whiteboard and then documented in the tool by a responsible person.

Since probably never all relevant people are available for the design workshops and thus not the complete know-how is represented, Signavio's comfortable collaboration features are used in the following phase.

All relevant people, whose opinion is additionally relevant for the design, are invited to comment via mail with a simple web link from the tool. Every user who has a simple web browser can now view and comment on the process models.

And the actual workshop participants can also give further input in the same way, if they still have change ideas later on. None of the users need to be provided with software in advance. A detailed introduction to the software is not necessary due to the self-explanatory functionality.

After the feedback phase, the core project team can view all comments centrally and, if necessary, quickly incorporate and redistribute any necessary changes. In the Sirius project methodology, the aggregation workshops then follow, in which the feedback from the feedback round is available to the project team for consolidation on the one hand, and the work results from the other design workshops on the other.

In this way, as many stakeholders as possible can be efficiently involved in this design phase - and this later ensures significantly greater acceptance during the rollout of the solution as well as the least possible time burden on the core project team and the extended project participants.

In the next phase, the results of the aggregation workshops are then transferred into a sprint backlog and implemented as software in several sprints during the implementation phase.

Extensive sprint reviews after each development cycle with the participation of the development, the IT project members AND the stakeholders from the business department ensure that really what was desired is developed or implemented. Again, Signavio is used as a process modeler, because all changes that occur now can be incorporated again quickly and easily.

Furthermore, Signavio not only offers the possibility to document processes according to the BPMN 2.0 standard, but also offers a number of other notation standards (UML, ArchiMate and others) to document, for example, interfaces, the software development itself or the underlying technology architecture.

In the Sirius project methodology, too, development is followed by testing, training and rollout. Once again, the process models created so far in the course of the project can be used here, for example in the creation of training documents.

Convenient export functions offer the possibility to export and convert the process models into many imaginable formats. During the tests, in addition to documenting their test cases, all testers can again deposit feedback in the Signavio collaboration portal.

During the final end-user trainings, users can take notes on "their" processes. In this way, all process-relevant documentation remains in one place and becomes a meaningful and useful tool for real end users.

In addition, the close involvement of the real end users of these processes ensures that the design phase does not "miss the mark". After project completion, users from the field can be invited again to review the documented processes in regular reviews, for example twice a year.

Conclusion and outlook

Sirius is also following with great interest the upcoming Solution Manager Release 7.2 with the new product-specific graphical BPMN editor. Here, significant progress can be expected in terms of both consistency (organization/process and technology/process) and usability, and a low-cost alternative for SAP customers.

Whether this editor represents a real alternative or rather a supplement, especially with regard to the collaborative functionalities, will be examined in detail by Sirius in the coming months. So process documentation does not necessarily have to be a boring and complicated process for specialists.

Used correctly - and equipped with the right functionalities - such a tool can create real benefits, accelerate projects and significantly increase the acceptance of new or adapted (business) processes through the targeted involvement of a large number of stakeholders.