Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
• Are you an expert of a specific topic? Are you the only one responsible for that
activity? Are there more people trained for that specific activity?
• How many activities are you doing inside a specific business process?
• How many activities related to different business processes are you currently do-
ing? (per day/week/month)
• Do you need to move information from one place to another by moving paper
forms to different departments or using the postal service?
• Do you use e-mail/chat as a communication channel to send information to cus-
tomers or to other business units?
• Do you interact directly with customers/clients face to face?
• Are you aware of the BPM practice and why the company wants to adopt it?
• Are you handling duplicate or unnecessary information?
• What are the well-known flaws of your activities?
• How do you deal with exceptional situations, missing pieces of information, or
new cases?
If they answer that they do paper work, you should get a scanned version of all the forms
that have to be filled out. If they are using different systems/screens/applications, get
those screenshots.
Always let interviewees know the goal of the process being analyzed and the purpose of
improving the processes and how that would help them in their everyday work. This will
increase collaboration on their side and reduce the stress associated with the fear of being
scrutinized on work performance. You're not there to evaluate them, but to learn from
them. Let them know that.
The information the interviews provide will help you understand what is being done to
achieve the business goal, and it will result in a list of all the activities that the company
executes related to that particular process.
Once you have all the different answers, you will be able to cross-reference them to de-
termine the main path of the business process at hand. An example that could be the out-
come of this first stage can be seen in the following figure:
