Department of Computing Semester 2, 2020 COMP3760/6760: Enterprise Systems Integration Assignment 2: BPM for improved Project Management Dr. Peter Busch Due 11:55 pm Tuesday - 8th September, 2020 COMP3760/6760 Assignment 2 Semester 2, 2020 Page 2 Business Process Modelling for improved Project Management Processes (source: Busch, P., Amirmazaheri, A., (2012) "Workflow Knowledge Sharing through Social Networks" Pacific-Asia Knowledge Acquisition Workshop (PKAW 2012)/Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI 7457) Kuching, Malaysia, September 5-6th pp: 343–349. LCPL: A SYDNEY-BASED COMPANY LCPL is an actual mining and construction enterprise headquartered in Sydney with more than 5000 employees across Australia. LCPL undertakes projects within the Asia-Pacific region, mainly in Australia and New Zealand. The company delivers projects for clients across the infrastructure, resources, civil engineering, energy and telecommunications sectors. The Process: Oracle Primavera P6 The Control and Planning group of LCPL provides systems and processes to manage and control projects. Oracle Primavera P6 1 is a project management tool managed by Group Operational Services (GOS) of the Control and Planning (CP) division of LCPL. Group Operational Services supports other business units through developing and maintaining control and planning standards and methodologies. All divisions within LCPL should use P6 for their project planning, update and control purposes. The GOS supports all Oracle Primavera P6 users across the company through a defined process (figure 1). To support P6 users, the GOS cooperates with LCPL’s IT group to integrate the support process with the IT service desk for the company. The IT service desk uses IT Service Management (ITSM) help-desk software 2 as a support tool to log requests, changes and incidents. The P6 support process is illustrated here for brevity (figure 1), but articulated later. Figure 1: The GSO support process (source: LCPL intranet). Through interviewing employees we could determine if employees actually used P6. Summarised results of the interviews are shown in table 1 below. 3 We were also able to determine who worked with whom in the organisation, meaning we could compare a real Business Process Management (BPM) process with the actual social networks between employees. 4 That is to say - do the GOS staff actually use P6 in their day to day 1 “Primavera P6 EPPM is the solution for globally prioritizing, planning, managing, and executing projects, programs, and portfolios” (source: https://www.oracle.com/industries/construction-engineering/primavera-p6/ accessed 28/7/20). 2 http://www.itsm.info/ITSM.htm (accessed 28/7/2020). 3 Only for your interest. You don’t need to be too concerned about this table. 4 Remember the KM material we looked at in week 4? COMP3760/6760 Assignment 2 Semester 2, 2020 Page 3 work? From the interview data (table 1) and a review of P6 blogs on the LCPL intranet 5 it appears a P6 issue can be raised by phone, email, Microsoft Office Communicator and ITSM. Table 1: Questions and answers on the use of P6 Questions Summarised Answer How often do you use Oracle Primavera P6? We use primavera on a daily basis to update and create new activities in the plan. If you have any issues, how and where do you raise them? - Through email, Phone, ITSM etc? I use my phone to raise my issue; I think it’s the fastest way I can get support. Do you use Dashboards and score cards for high level project reporting from P6 Web Access? 6 Yes, we use P6 Web Access for high level report. Which application do you use in addition to Primavera P6 for reporting and analysis purposes? Linear plus, 7 Excel, Acumen Fuse 8 or …? We use only Excel for our reporting and analysis purposes. When working with Oracle Primavera P6 to plan and analyse projects, who else do you interact with? What is the purpose of that interaction? How does it occur? I work with the site engineer to update my plans. And, with the project manager to acquire plan changes. Also, one of the planners (Mr. X) guides me to update the plan and creates the report. Usually, I raise questions when they are around or call them to answer my questions. If you have any issues in working with Oracle Primavera P6, with whom will you raise your problem? I raise my issues with my colleague Mr. Y first. We discuss the issue and try to solve it. Then we ask others who have experience and if we don’t get a proper result I’ll call a [technical] support staff member. The P6 group through Social Network Analysis During their interviews, the P6 group were asked to nominate colleagues they networked with and how often, which led to the establishment of the sociogram (figure 2) illustrating the group of employees associated with the P6 process. An examination of the nodes in the network reveal twelve actors or staff varying from Senior Planners (3 staff), an Optimisation Manager, Planners (3 staff), a Site Engineer, a Planning Manager, a Scheduler, a Systems Analyst and a Business Analyst. Square nodes represent males and circle nodes represent females etc. The colours of the nodes simply relate to the ages of employees (red 40yo; green 36yo ….). 9 The edges in the graph reveal the strength of the flow of information, given that relations among actors provide access to resources (Wasserman and Faust, 1994; Wetherell, 1998). Note the thickness of the lines - solid for stronger lines of communication (i.e. hourly) down to thin dashed lines (weekly) for less frequent communication among actors. Some aspects are immediately apparent from figure 2. The male senior planner (bottom left) is a relative P6-process isolate who works on the process only through the female senior planner to his top right. The female business analyst (light blue) in the centre of the graph works with both Microsoft Communicator with her male planner colleague to her bottom right; her communication flow with this colleague is particularly strong as she communicates with him hourly. The only staff involved in the P6 process who communicate via the IT help-desk’s ITSM software are the female senior planner (bottom right), the ‘star’ business analyst in the centre, the male site engineer (in green - right centre), as well as the planning manager (in grey - centre left). The remaining communication flows with regard to working on P6 related issues are by way of verbal communication. Again note how often employees see one another. 5 An intranet is basically the internet but for internal organisation use only. An analogy is iLearn which is available over the internet to people only enrolled in the unit. 6 P6 web access is the web based application version of Oracle Primavera P6. In some projects project managers use this application to approve timesheets. 7 Planners in some projects use Linear Plus to create time charts of the project. This application imports schedule data from Oracle Primavera P6 8 Acumen Fuse is metric analysis and visualization tool that assesses quality of schedules, accuracy of forecasts, and realism of risk models, earned value and project performance. 9 The colours of the nodes and genders are not particularly relevant here but are mentioned for interest only. COMP3760/6760 Assignment 2 Semester 2, 2020 Page 4 Figure 2: illustrating the Social Network in LCPL (edge-strength in descending order: 6.0 hourly contact; 5.0 every few hours; 4.0 daily contact; 3.0 once every couple of days; 2.0 weekly contact). Our bottom-left senior planner sees his female senior planner colleague only daily, but other employees involved in the P6 process, such as the P6 Optimisation Manager (top), meets with a senior planner (top) only weekly. Another planner (bottom centre) is also a relative isolate in the P6 process and has no other connection with her employees other than through our (SNA high-centrality ranked female) business analyst in the middle, and even then only on a weekly basis. SUMMARY To recapitulate - the specific process in question is the Oracle Primavera P6 project portfolio management support process as part of Group Operational Services in the Control and Planning division of LCPL. The P6 process provides the steps for users and Group Operational Services to raise any P6 related issues, change management and service requests through the use of ITSM. Again, ITSM is an IT service-desk application for supporting users among disparate organisational divisions. The steps of the P6 process (figure 1) are: 1. A user raises a request through ITSM and receives a ticket number; 2. The service desk assigns the request to a related team; 3. The support team receives the ticket and accepts the request through the ITSM IT help-desk software; 4. The support team revises any issues and logs their resolution; 5. The support team advises users; 6. If the issue is resolved it will be closed, or else the support team will undertake further investigation. The above process has always been documented in LCPL business documents, and it was assumed all requests were raised based on the above routine. In fact an analysis from a multitude of sources: blogs, internal company COMP3760/6760 Assignment 2 Semester 2, 2020 Page 5 literature and also SNA results (figure 2), reveals discrepancies between the ‘official’ documented P6 support process and a real work-flow in LCPL. For one thing, users raise their P6 issues through phone and email or by approaching the IT help-desk personally, rather than through the official channel of ITSM help-desk software. In addition, some P6 related staff use Microsoft Office Communicator to chat with the support team, which was also never intended as part of the official P6 support process in LCPL. Furthermore, results of the above analysis reveal that users raise their issues first with their colleagues in a tacit knowledge sense (Sanzogni, Guzman and Busch, 2017), 10 and then more broadly with the P6 support team. These extra steps in the P6 support process were also never originally envisaged by LCPL management. Furthermore our analysis revealed issues received by the support team differ markedly amongst diverse LCPL groups’ that is to say employees with P6-savvy colleagues raise fewer issues. BIBLIOGRAPHY Albino, V., Garavelli, A., Gorgoglione, M., (2004) “Organization and technology in knowledge transfer” Benchmarking: An International Journal 11(6) pp: 584-600. Busch, P., Amirmazaheri, A., (2012) "Workflow Knowledge Sharing through Social Networks" Pacific Rim Knowledge Acquisition Workshop (PKAW 2012)/Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI 7457) Kuching, Malaysia, September 5-6th pp: 343–349. Busch, P., Fettke, P., (2011) “Business process management under the microscope: the potential of social network analysis” Proceedings of the 44th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS-44 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), pp: 1-10 Bruque, S., Moyano, J., Eisenberg, J., (2008/2009) “Individual Adaptation to IT-Induced Change: The Role of Social Networks” Journal of Management Information Systems Winter 25(3) pp: 177-206. Deokar, A., Kolfschoten, G., de Vreede, G., (2008) “Prescriptive Workflow Design for Collaboration-intensive Processes using the Collaboration Engineering Approach” Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management 9(4) pp: 11-20. Fisher, D., (2004) “The Business Process Maturity Model: A Practical Approach for Identifying Opportunities for Optimization” Business Process Trends (www.bptrends.com accessed 28/7/2020). Guzman, G., Wilson, J., (2005) “The “soft” dimension of organizational knowledge transfer” Journal of Knowledge Management 9(2) pp: 59-74. Hanachi, C., Khaloul, I., (2008) “Discovering Protocols and Organizational Structures in Workflows” NOTERE 2008 June 23-27th Lyon, France pp: 93-105. Hanneman, R., (2002) Introduction to Social Network Methods (http://faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/nettext/ accessed 28/7/2020). Hassan, N., (2009) “Using Social Network Analysis to Measure IT-Enabled Business Process Performance„ Information Systems Management Vol. 26 pp: 61–76. Houy, C., Fettke, P., Loos, P., (2010) “Empirical Research in Business Process Management-Analysis of an emerging field of research” Business Process Management Journal 16(4) pp: 619-661. Jeston, J., Nelis, J., (2006) Business Process Management: Practical Guidelines to Successful Implementations Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann Oxford U.K. Kao, S-Y., Busch, P., Guzman, G., Sanzogni, L., (2018) “Success factors for effective use of KM systems in SMEs” Proceedings of the 32nd International Business Information Management Association Conference, IBIMA Seville Spain pp: 115-127 Keshishi, A., Busch, P., (2014) “Interpreting overlaps in business process mapping via organisational soft knowledge flows13th Pacific Rim Knowledge Acquisition Workshop, PKAW 2014 Gold Cost, Qld, Australia, December 1-2, Switzerland: Springer, Springer Nature, pp: 209-222. 10 Unwritten internalised knowledge, typically transferred by word of mouth or by learning through watching others perform actions. COMP3760/6760 Assignment 2 Semester 2, 2020 Page 6 Kim, E., Busch, P., (2016) “Workflow interpretation via social networks” 14th Pacific Rim Knowledge Acquisition Workshop, PKAW Switzerland: Springer, Springer Nature, Vol. 9806 pp: 241-250. Koschmider, A., Song, M., Reijers, H., (2009) “Social Software for Modeling Business Processes” BPM 2008 Workshops LNBIP (Ardagna, D., et al. (eds.)) Vol. 17 pp: 666-677. Liebowitz, J., (2005) “Linking social network analysis with the analytic hierarchy process for knowledge mapping in organizations” Journal of Knowledge Management 9(1) pp: 76-86. Magdaleno, A., Cappelli, C., Baião, F., Santoro F., Araujo, R., (2008) “Towards Collaboration Maturity in Business Processes: An Exploratory Study in Oil Production Processes” Information Systems Management 25(4) pp: 302–318. Oritogun, K., Busch, P., Picoto, W., (2018) “Effectiveness of social media for KM tools in SMEs” in Proceedings of the 32nd International Business Information Management Association Conference, IBIMA Seville Spain, pp: 191-202. O’Reilly, C., (1991) “Organizational Behaviour: Where we’ve been, where we’re going” Annual Review of Psychology Vol. 42 pp: 427-458. Papazoglou, M., Ribbers, P., (2006) e-Business: Organizational and Technical Foundations John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Chichester West Sussex U.K. Rosemann, M., de Bruin, T., Power, B., (2006) “A Model to Measure Business Process Management Maturity and Improve Performance” in Business Process Management Butterworth-Heinemann. Sanzogni, L., Guzman, G., Busch, P., (2017) "Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Management: Questioning the Tacit Dimension" Prometheus 5(1) pp: 37-56. 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Weske, M., (2007) Business Process Management, Concepts, Languages, Architectures Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg COMP3760/6760 Assignment 2 Semester 2, 2020 Page 7 Assignment algorithm! You are a Business Analyst (BA) undertaking BPM to improve processes within LCPL. a. Read pages 335-340 (section 12.6 - 12.7) with regard to BPMN (Papazoglou and Ribbers, 2006). These pages are included with this assignment. b. Consider the software you wish to use – either BPM 4.2 in the labs or other options (appendix 1). c. Re-read pages 2-5 above, taking what you feel is relevant and ignoring what is not. d. Examine figures 1 and 2 (above) 11 and appendix 2 (below) for an idea of how to create your To-Be process. e. Consider the employee social networks and tools actually used by employees (figure 2). Take what ideas here you might consider relevant to creating a To-Be process model. f. Implement one To-Be process model only for the scenario above (using figures 1, 2 and 3 to help you). You are free to make intuitive judgments as to processes (figure 1 above is a guide) and personnel needed (figure 2 is a great start). You are free as a business analyst to re-work processes! 1. Implement the above scenario 12 How would you improve the processes? What would you add? What would you take away? Who are the personnel? 13 Explain your assumptions! 2. Take your BPM models, screen-dump them in to a report and briefly discuss what you have done. 3. PDF your report. 4. Submit your report on iLearn. Deliverables Soft copy only One
file as a report explaining what you have done etc. - The file should include supporting data which could be relegated to appendices. - Use connectors in your diagrams and export to your document using screen shots (PrtSc). Submission Place your soft copy in your assignment 2 submission folder on iLearn. DUE: 11.55pm, Tuesday 8th September 11 You can consider figure 1 to be the As-Is process basically. 12 … in BPM 4.2 or Adonis or other BPM software of your choosing (as listed in appendix 1). 13 Figure 2 tells you who the staff are. COMP3760/6760 Assignment 2 Semester 2, 2020 Page 8 Marking Rubric Developing (Borderline Pass-Fail) Functional (Pass) Proficient (Credit) Advanced (Distinction-High Distinction) Modelling software Limited use of BP Modeller showing some understanding of the tool Competent use of BP Modeller showing understanding of the software and ability to use it effectively, perhaps making some basic mistakes Good understanding of the software, modelling workflows proficiently and using tool appropriately without any significant mistakes Excellent understanding of the software, modelling workflows proficiently and using tool appropriately at an expert level Workflow modelling Limited understanding of workflow modelling, some obvious mistakes Competent understanding of workflow modelling, some trivial mistakes still in evidence, but generally an understanding of what is taking place and why Some incorporation of the literature beyond just competent understanding of workflow modelling An excellent grasp of workflow modelling, also drawing on the literature widely to exemplify in the case of further examples how workflow modelling has aided other organisations as well COMP3760/6760 Assignment 2 Semester 2, 2020 Page 9 Appendix 1 - Business Process Modeling Notation Tools 14 15 Business process modeling (BPM) refers to the activity undertaken to represent processes of an organization to analyze and conduct process improvement if necessary (Jeston and Nelis, 2006). Business Process Modelling and Notation (BPMN) is a business process-modelling standard enabling graphical notation for specifying business processes in a Business Process Diagram (BPD) using a flowcharting technique. 16 Name Platform/OS BPMN Version Feature Software license Activity Modeler Cross-Platform 2.0 Simulation, Modeler, Execution Apache License 2.0 ADONIS (Software) Windows 2.0 Business Process Analysis (BPA) tool. Supports business process management enabling process modeling, simulation, analysis, evaluation, automation, and publishing. Proprietary/Freeware ARCWAY Cockpit Windows and Mac. Linux unofficially 2.0 BPMN Collaboration Diagrams, Petri Nets, EPC, integrated with FMC Block diagrams for business and Information Technology architecture, UML Class diagrams for data models and Requirements management. Proprietary, free single user edition BPMN Web Modeler Cloud 2.0 Process Animator to learn about the dynamic behaviour of the model, migration BPMN 2.0 tool, live teamwork support, process repository, process simulator, Interchange capability. Shareware, Proprietary HP Process Automation Java/Windows 2.0 Effective as a standalone Business Process Model application. Integrated suite of applications to offer end-to-end Solutions for Content and Human Centric Processes. Single vendor solution from HP MFPs to Document Capture, Process Automation, Content Management, Records Retention, Legal Holds and Content Distribution Proprietary IBM BlueWorks Live Browser based cloud 2.0 Sophisticated process management platform, Specific custom properties for documentation, Analysis and comparison of process metrics, sharing processes in the cloud, automatically backs up and saves Proprietary Microsoft Visio 2013 Windows BPMN2 Modeling and validation. Does not provide support for Data Input/Output. Does not also provide support for BPMN file format Proprietary 14 Just some examples of software you may choose to use in this assignment – up to you! 15 Source: World Heritage Encyclopaedia, 2017 16 https://www.omg.org/bpmn/ (accessed 3/8/20). COMP3760/6760 Assignment 2 Semester 2, 2020 Page 10 Appendix 2 – As Is Hospital Stores Procurement Process Minimum/ Maximum Levels Set Report Run on Current Stock Levels Calculate Reorder Quantity Key New Order into ERP System Item has backorders ? Autofax Purchase Order to Supplier Alternate supplier available ? NO YES NO Adjust ERP Supplier for all orders of item Fax all orders for item to new supplier Cancel old order on old supplier Receive Item into Store with GRN Form Reconcile GRN with Supplier Delivery Docket Are there errors ? Enter received items into ERP System Put items on shelf Resolve error with supplier YES NO YES Mail delivery of Invoice Book Invoice intoERP system Invoice matches GRN and PO ? End Submit Credit Request to Supplier Supplier accepts credit request ? Discuss with Supervisor Supervisor resolves with Supplier YES NO YES NO Pay Supplier