Archive of Process Flow Articles

Business rules are often hidden in processes as hidden decisions.  Once you discover that hidden decision, how do you communicate the impact of exposing and managing the decision?

A business process is not just a sequence of steps.  A business process is a series of decisions and actions.  Some decisions are obvious and can be actively managed.  Some decisions are hidden, and until you discover them, you can’t manage or improve them.  Here is a real-world example of the discovery of a hidden enterprise decision.

Traditional requirements happen after a multi-system architecture has been defined.

But what about the requirements that feed into that architecture? The requirements that drive the enterprise architecture decisions in the first place? We haven’t talked about those before.

Documenting processes is something most business analysts have to do. The goal of documenting the process is to communicate requirements. By establishing a shared understanding of the process, you can establish the context for the requirements. Easy processes are easy to draw and understand. When documenting a more complex process, you need to provide the same clarity and consistency. In this article we show how to document asynchronous process steps to maximize the clarity of the documentation.

Product managers are often described as the hub or center of a software development organization. Saeed Khan takes umbrage with this under-appreciative image in an awesome article about information flow, product managers, and the SDLC.