IAB203 Business Process Modelling
semester 1, 2020
Assignment 2
1 Key Info
Groups groups of 2 or 3 students (independent of the groups of assignment
1; register again on Blackboard)
Deadline 31 May, 23:59 (end of week 12)
Page limit unlimited. Suggestion: ≤ 20 pages for main report, 10-15 pages
per guideline.
Weight 40%
Submit one PDF per group on Blackboard
Questions contact Ryan Dunn, [email protected]
2 Introduction
Emerging new Business models with the disruptive technologies and globalization of education
providers are rapidly changing the shape of higher education industry. Unlike in the past, uni-
versities cannot afford to simply depend upon the market or the government but need to take
responsibility and initiative for adapting to the changing environment. Many universities have
started organizational transformations and are applying business process management as a core
mechanism, to assist them with these transformation journeys.
For these very similar purposes, the University of ’s-Hertogenbosch (UH) has commenced a
whole-of-university wide initiative, with the aim of making ‘true-impact’ to their business opera-
tions. A main drive behind this is to identify areas for cost reduction and with a keen eye towards
possible automation of business processes for long term, sustainable efficiency.
The university has put together a project team; the ‘UXBPM’ team - to drive this initiative
forward. The UXBPM team have recruited your IAB203 team as a group of junior Business
Analysts, to help them with the initiative, specifically with the process modelling components.
3 Case Organisation and Proposed Program of Work
The University of ’s-Hertogenbosch (UH) located in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, was founded
in 1895. It is an established university with over 45,000 students and more than 13,000 staff members
(9500 academic staff and the rest professional staff). UH is among the top 100 universities in the
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world. It has 7 faculties: Medicine, IT, Science, Engineering, Arts, Social sciences and Business,
each running multiple courses covering Bachelors, Honours, Masters and PhD programs. 50− 80%
of the student cohorts in each course are international students from over 125 countries.
As an outcome of its periodic corporate reviews, UH recognised the need to address opera-
tional inefficiencies as part of the required organizational transformation. Given the age and size
of the university, processes are complex and currently supported by a suite of in-house legacy
systems, some too old to have any application programming interfaces (APIs). It was identified
that administrative business processes at the university highly contributed to resource costs, time
delays, diminished services, inefficiency, duplication, parallel effort across Faculties and Divisions
and also created rework. In 2018 the university recruited ‘Systems Guru’ consulting to develop
systems upgrades to the complex suit of already existing in-house processes and to automate some
of the manual processes, which unfortunately ended with much project delays and failed project
implementations. A detailed report done by UH’s external auditors strongly recommended that
the university’s business processes be looked into and improved first, prior to any further systems
implementations or upgrades.
In recognition to this, in July 2019, Professor Smart, rector of UH, a position comparable to a
vice-chancellor, proposed and laid the foundation for a university-wide process improvement effort
with establishing the UXBPM team. The UXBPM team is expected to deliver a range of outcomes
including improving user experience, visibility and control and reducing effort, cost and risk etc.,
through a program of process improvement initiatives. However, the UXBPM team is small with
3 full time Senior Business Analysts experienced with business transformations and 2 part time
junior analysts, and a minimalistic annual budget to spend on contractual positions.
The UXBPM team report to the university board’s steering committee (this includes the rector,
and 4 vice-rectors, deans of the 7 faculties and Division Heads of HR, Finance, IT, Asset man-
agement and Student Services). While the majority of the steering committee have had no prior
experience nor formal training on business processes management (BPM) they have seen other
universities and institutions ‘do BPM’ and achieve diverse benefits from such, and want quick, yet
robust outcomes coming through soon for UH as well.
4 Your Project’s Role in the Program of Work
At present, one of the senior Business Analysts and both of the junior analysts have already been
allocated to address some critical issues that emerged in the recent systems upgrade at UH’s student
enrolment support system. And the UXBPM team is under pressure to deliver the outcomes of a
pilot project by end of August 2020, and detailed work plans for the new financial year by June
2020 as well.
Given the recent systems failures of the student enrolment support system, the student enrolment
process was selected as the pilot project. But the UXBPM team is aware that moving forward, a
more systematic approach to prioritising the target processes for process improvement is essential,
and that they will need to get the buy-in and support from the business-area heads and other
employees to roll things out. This includes upskilling selected staff from the business areas to be
able to accurately capture their current processes in the form of business process models, identity
areas of improvement, and when possible execute process improvements with the support of the
UXBPM team.
Business Process Modelling is a core component in all the process improvement and analysis
techniques that the UXBPM team will apply and this is where you will contribute to. In particular
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your team has been asked to:
• Derive process modelling guidelines that can be applied across UH for all the upcoming
process improvements efforts at UXBPM. This should cater for both the experienced process
modellers (i.e. the members of the UXBPM team), and the novel process modellers from the
business areas (see Section 4.1 for more details).
• Using an environmental scan of university processes and existing process architectures that
are designed for the education Sector, derive a detailed process architecture. The process
architecture should consist of a process landscape diagram, details of the set process hierarchy
levels, and a decomposition of all processes to (at least) one further level beyond what is
depicted in the process landscape document. (see Section 4.2 for more details).
• Model the current student enrolment process (see a detailed description of the current state
of the process in Section 5), applying the proposed modelling guidelines (and making further
enhancements, as/if needed) (see Section 4.3 for more details).
Present your findings in a report for your customer, UH. The structure of the report is up to
you, although at least an executive summary, an introduction and a conclusion are necessary. For
more details, please refer to Section 6.
4.1 Modelling Guidelines
UH’s intention is to train selected staff from each of the business areas (i.e. the faculties and
divisions) at UH, so they can maintain the models that are created in this initial stage, and later
on (in the long term) model and maintain their own processes themselves. The UXBPM team also
require detailed modelling guidelines for their team’s internal purposes. Plan and develop 2 separate
modelling guidelines for (i) internal UHBPM team use and another for (ii) UH’s business-area users.
1. Design each set of guidelines, explaining how the following principals were considered:
• Identifying purpose of the modelling guidelines; specific to the target audience.
• Decisions on what content to have within the modelling guidelines, and in what level of
detail/ abstraction.
• Decisions on how to communicate the modelling guidelines to its users.
• Governance around the modelling guidelines.
• Also include any other considerations made at the design phase.
2. Develop and present the modelling guidelines as appendixes within the report in a professional
manner. The intention is to be able to immediately start using them at UH.
Hint: Apply the “process modelling-guidelines development” framework introduced in week 10
& 11. Also consider how the process hierarchy levels (of Section 4.2) may need to be integrated
into the modelling guidelines.
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Table 1: Example of decomposed main process (extracted from APQC’s cross industry classification
framework).
Hierarchy ID name
2.0 Develop and Manage Products and Services
2.1 Govern and manage product/service development program
2.2 Generate and define new product/service ideas
2.3 Develop products and services
4.2 Process Architecture
For this part, you must complete the following:
1. Explain how the main processes were identified. You will need to align things as best as
possible to what you know of UH’s organisational context, and clearly articulate all assump-
tions made. You may use a general environmental scan of university processes and/or apply
a suitable reference process model. The final outcome has to be justified, well explained and
presented visually in a process landscape diagram.
2. The process hierarchy should be clearly presented and justified. The different levels and
rational for each must be explained.
3. All core processes should be further decomposed to one further level (adhering to the level
definitions in your hierarchy), and presented in a hierarchical, indexed manner, as shown in
the example of Table 1.
Hint: Apply the information and guidelines introduced in week 8 & 9.
4.3 Modelling
Model the scenario of Section 5.
• Describe the positioning of the enrolment process in the process architecture, including the
relevant value chains in which the enrolment process is involved.
• Model the control flow, the data and the resource perspective in BPMN;
• Make sure that it adheres as much as possible to the as-is description in Section 5. However,
as with any real-life modelling effort, not every aspect of the process is described, and not all
described behaviour can be modelled. Document and motivate these cases in the report;
• Make sure your model is structurally correct;
• In the report, the model should be readable on A4 paper without zooming in;
• The model should adhere to your own conventions, and the link with your hierarchy should
be described.
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5 The as-is Student Enrolment Process
The enrolment process starts when a student submits all the required forms and documentation to
the online enrolment system. As a first step, the academic qualifications of the student are verified
with an external agency, and the student is given an academic score. Then, at the closing date of
applications, a selection is made of the students based on their academic merits. Then, the payment
is performed followed by a visa application for international students, while in the meantime the
advanced standing requests are processed. After all these steps have been completed, the student
is registered for the course, and for the chosen units. At any moment students have been asking for
updates on the status of their enrolment applications. At any time during the process, a student can
withdraw the enrolment application for a full refund, or inquire about the status of the enrolment
application.
Once the payment has been processed, a visa sponsorship application is made with the im-
migration department of the Australian government. If there is no reply from the immigration
department within 20 days, a manual inquiry is made by the professional staff1. Once the approval
has been received, the student is notified by professional staff and encouraged to lodge their visa
application. After 30 days, the student is notified by an automatic system to inform UH of any
status changes in the visa processing. Once the student has notified UH of the outcome, UH verifies
the granted visa with the immigration department. Unfortunately, in the current situation, it has
occurred that already granted visa were cancelled by the immigration department, in which case UH
was notified, and provided the student with the option to withdraw the enrolment application with
a certificate of acceptance, or to continue with a reduced list of units that could be taken online.
If at any stage the student withdraws, UH notifies the immigration department and recommends
cancellation of the granted visa.
Professional staff assigns students an academic score based on several criteria, partly assisted
by input of academic staff members. After the closing date of enrolment applications, the highest-
ranking students are admitted, as many as there are places available.
Payments are performed by an automated system that interacts with UH’s standard payment
provider. Sometimes, transactions are successfully disputed well after being approved, which voids
the payment retroactively, and consequently the application or enrolment.
In their initial application, students can include requests for advanced standing of particular
units. For each such request, professional staff identifies the unit coordinator and forwards the
request to the unit coordinator for assessment. The unit coordinator might get in touch with the
student to obtain more information regarding the advanced standing request; if the student does
not respond within 10 working days, the decision will be negative. On a positive decision of the
unit coordinator, the decision is registered in the student progress information system.
Hint: unit coordinators are academic staff.
1Which does not imply that the staff executing other core processes in UH are not professionals.
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6 Marking Criteria
This is a draft of the marking criteria we will use to mark the second assignment, to give an idea what we’re looking for. If multiple boxes could apply, we generally
choose the leftmost one. The points sum to 100 and count for 40% towards the unit score. No penalties apply for reports that exceed the page limit, as for this
assignment, this is a soft limit. However, please note that you don’t need more pages to do the assignment. Plagiarism will be reported to the SEF student misconduct
committee.
Deliverable unacceptable needs work acceptable good excellent points
0− 15 15 − 25 25 − 35 35 − 45 45 − 1
Presentation & professionalism format of report (structure, layout, grammar & spelling, consistency, readability of model, . . . ) 8
0 criteria met 1 criterion met 2 criteria met 3 criteria met 4-5 criteria met
Modelling guidelines
Design clearly articulated by explaining essential aspects such as purpose, target audience, content and level of detail, communication
plans, critical governance considerations etc.
10
Guidelines for
UHBPM team
presented professionally, clear, suits audience, complete, appropriate level of detail, applied core design principles for modelling-
guideline derivation
8
Guidelines for
business-area users
presented professionally, clear, suits audience, complete, appropriate level of detail, applied core design principles for modelling-
guideline derivation
8
Process architecture
Process architec-
ture
Derivation of the main processes clearly articulated, justified, supported by other evidences such as reference models and case
extracts, depicted visually in a single page landscape diagram
10
Process hierarchy clearly presented using text and visuals, justified, has an overview introducing all levels, each level clearly defined and explained. 6
Landscape all core processes from the landscape decomposed one level further, presented hierarchical and indexed, they are clear, complete
and appropriately communicated (e.g. labels used well, indexing is simple and easy to follow, etc.)
10
Modelling
Control flow structurally correct, behaviourally correct, semantically correct, gaps filled and documented where appropriate 20
Data every activity has the data inputs and outputs it needs, structurally correct, semantically correct, gaps filled and documented where
appropriate
10
Resources matches the given process description, structurally correct, semantically correct, gaps filled and documented where appropriate 5
Embedding adherence to conventions, clear links to hierarchy, part of value chain(s) 5
6