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Re-inventing the Business Process(es) at LCPL

(source: Busch and Amirmazaheri, 2012)

LCPL

LCPL is an existing mining and construction company headquartered in Sydney, employing in excess of

5,000 employees across Australia. Business processes in LCPL are organised into three areas - they are

winning, delivering and supporting work processes (table 1).

Table 1: LCPL Contractor Business Processes high level (source: Amirmazaheri, 2011 p. 10).

Area Contains

Winning Work Processes Involved in winning new business, including Business Development, Business

Planning and Tendering.

Delivering Work Processes Required to perform each stage of the delivery of a project and progress it to the

next stage, from project start-up through to close.

Supporting Work Processes Supports LCPL business and project activities at corporate, divisional, business

unit and project level, e.g. quality and safety.

Within the Supporting Work Processes section of LCPL is the Control and Planning (CP) division (figure

1). In turn CP has different groups who provide the standards and policies for other project groups in the

company. One such group is Group Operational Services (GOS), responsible for supporting other business

units in developing and maintaining control and planning standards and methodologies (figure 2).

Figure 1: Level 1 and 2 Business chart (source: Amirmazaheri, 2011 p. 11).

The P6 Support Process

For this assignment (using a case study), the use by GOS employees of Oracle Primavera P6 will be

examined. P6 is an example of project portfolio management software. The purpose of the case study was to

compare a real business process workflow (figure 3) that is already applied in the company against the

informal social networks that exist between employees. Officially all divisions within LCPL should use P6

for their project planning, update and control purposes. To support P6 users, the GOS cooperates with

LCPLs IT group to integrate the support process with the IT service desk for the company, where IT Service

Management (ITSM) help-desk software is used to log requests, changes and incidents.

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Figure 2: Group Operational Services tasks (source: Amirmazaheri, 2011 p. 13).

Figure 3: The GOS support process using Oracle Primavera (source: Amirmazaheri, 2011 p. 14).

To gather data from the relevant P6 process employees, open-question interviews were conducted with 12

staff members at LCPL between April and May of 2011 (table 2).

The interviewees were chosen because (a) they formed a group that used the P6 process intensively and (b)

they provided a blend of occupation types. The roles of the interviewees were - optimization manager, three

senior planners, three planners (not senior), a scheduler, a planning manager, a site engineer, a systems

analyst and a business analyst. Examples of the sorts of people interviewed and their roles are provided in

table 3.

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Table 2: Questions asked of the 12 selected staff members at LCPL (source: Amirmazaheri, 2011 p. 19).

Table 3: Example roles and responsibilities (source: Amirmazaheri, 2011 p. 20).

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The P6 group at LCPL through Social Network Analysis (SNA)

In these same interviews mentioned above, interviewees were also asked to nominate colleagues they

worked with and how often. These details were then fed in to SNA software so their working relationships

could be mapped (figure 4).

Figure 4: illustrating the Social Workplace Network in LCPL (source: Busch and Amirmazaheri, 2014 p. 5).

Figure 4 explores the interaction of the staff introduced above, through the lens of SNA [week 4 lecture

material]. Merely for the readers interest, squares represent males, circles represent females and colours of

nodes relate to ages of employees (red = 40 years old; green = 36 years old etc). The edges in the graph

reveal the strength of information flow, given that relations among actors determine access to information

resources (Hansen, 1999; Wasserman and Faust, 1994). Edge-strength in descending order is as follows: a

value of 6.0 on the edge of the graph represents hourly contact; a value of 5.0 represents contact every few

hours; a value of 4.0 indicates daily contact between colleagues; a value of 3.0 indicates staff interact once

every couple of days; finally a value of 2.0 infers no more than weekly contact between colleagues.

Some aspects are immediately apparent from figure 4. The senior planner (bottom left) is a relative

P6-process isolate, who works on the process only through the senior planner to his top right. Only two

colleagues: the business analyst (light blue in the middle of the graph) and her planner colleague to her

bottom right use Lync (formerly Office Communicator, now Skype); the business analysts communication

flow with this colleague is particularly strong as she communicates with him hourly. Interestingly the only

staff involved in the P6 process who communicate via the IT help-desks ITSM software are the senior

planner (bottom right), the star business analyst in the middle, the site engineer (in green - right middle), as

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well as the planning manager (in grey - middle left). Management was surprised at the paucity of staff

utilising ITSM as their means of communication.

The remaining communication flows with regard to working on P6 related issues were by way of verbal

communication. Note how often employees see one another; our bottom-left senior planner collaborates with

his senior planner colleague only daily which may suffice, 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 middle) is also a relative isolate in the P6 process and has no other connection with her employees

other than through the (high-centrality ranked) business analyst in the middle, and then only on a weekly

basis.

Results

From an analysis of a multitude of sources including blogs, internal company literature and also the SNA

results (figure 4), differences exist between the officially documented P6 support process and the actual

work-flow in LCPL. 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. In addition, some P6-related staff use Lync to

chat with the support team, which was never intended to be part of the official P6 support process. As a

result of this last discovery, management is now seeking to change processes to officially incorporate Lync

(now Skype).

The above analysis reveals that users raise their issues first with their colleagues and then more broadly with

the P6 support team in a tacit knowledge sense. There exists substantial evidence that tacit knowledge flows

underpin most knowledge understanding and transferal processes (Busch, 2008; Sternberg et al., 2000). As

such it is hardly surprising that employees approach their colleagues first as a means of resolving issues,

particularly if the strength of workgroup ties is strong (Hansen, 1999).

However such extra steps in the P6 support process were never envisaged by LCPL management. The

analysis reveals varying severities of issues received by the support team that differ markedly amongst

diverse LCPL groups. For example employees with P6-savvy colleagues raise fewer issues, the ramifications

of which are that the training support team in the company can obtain a better idea of the level of instruction.

Even such superficial findings have nonetheless provided management at LCPL with ideas for process

improvement.

Need for change

Business Process Management provides a consistent strategy to develop and implement organisational

operational changes (Weske, 2007). As an example here, it transpires that the documented P6 process is in

fact not run by users and requires some modification to be more effective. The status quo at LCPL is as

follows: 1) all support services should be performed through ITSM, which is the central support management

system in the company; 2) users are distributed across the country and do not have access to their local

domain constantly; 3) P6 is the enterprise application selected for all projects, and GOS can receive requests

from a projects client users; and 4) there are some urgent requests that should be fixed with the highest

priority.

Management have now come to acknowledge the following options at LCPL: 1) users can raise their

requests by sending an email to the service desk and cc-ing their request to the P6 Support email address, so

that the service desk can create a ticket while administration is fixing the issue; 2) that the ITSM software

now incorporates a module helping supporters to capture calls as an incident; this call-capture function will

also be useful for training purposes later.

Options for the firm?

Arising out of the above changes to the P6 business process were two options for LCPL. Option 1 does not

add costs to the business and the user support process will be more efficient and reliable. The benefits of

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these changes are: a) GOS can provide monthly support reports from their use of ITSM to plan their

short-term and long-term support strategies; b) GOS can plan required training courses based on the level of

issues received by the system; c) GOS can use ITSM for other types of services, such as the Process Support

Service that supports project team members to the standards issued by the CP division; d) the GOS manager

will be better able to calculate the work hours of GOS employees.

With option 2 - e) all requests will be logged in to the system and the user need have no interaction with the

ITSM software. However implementation of this recommendation produces a cost for LCPL in that some

system settings will require re-adjustment, as it now needs to purchase this module as well as produce an

internal staff costing. f) Additionally some modifications will be required to the P6 process for reporting

purposes. Through the solution mentioned, the business process was modified to fill the gap between the

official process and the informal social network identified among employees via SNA.

Currently GOS is able to control all requests and can evaluate the work loads of its support team monthly.

Furthermore, users are confident that they will receive their service at the right time, since their requests are

in the queue and the support team cannot miss such requests by mistake. LCPL is now further currently

establishing which documented business processes lack integration with social networks within the firm.

Finally, in all businesses there are sets of hidden factors such as human social concepts that have significant

impacts on business process management.

What next?

The overall (brief) system description as it currently exists is given in table 4.

Table 4: Brief Process/cost table for one As-Is cycle

Entities, Tasks, Decisions Current Document Type Process Times Person responsible

Total

Cost $

Elapsed

(min)

Working

(min)

User

Raise request in to the ITSM Manual entry 15 10 Optimisation Manager 50

ITSM staff

Create an incident ticket in the

ITSM system Manual entry 15 5 Business Analyst 50

Assign incident to ITSM team

member Manual entry 10 5 Planning Manager 40

GOS staff

Check to see if incident assigned

correctly Verbal communication 20 5 Senior Planner 70

Resolve ticket Online in ITSM 15 5 Site Engineer 50

Advise user that ticket is resolved Lync/skype 5 3 Business Analyst 30

If issue not resolved, then

investigate issue Check systems in GOS 30 25 Site Engineer 100

If issue fixed, then notify user Email 5 3 Planning Manager 60

User

User notifies ITSM group ticket is

resolved to their satisfaction Email 10 5 Optimisation Manager 90

ITSM staff

Ticket is closed Manual entry 10 5 Business Analyst 70

Figure 5 provides a functional model in the form of a simple data flow diagram. Although it may appear that

the above exercise is without cost, this is not the case. Quite a few of the As Is processes in place are

outdated. Processes could be made more efficient through re-engineering and/or taking certain processes and

making them even more electronic in format (To Be).

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Figure 5: Sample As Is Order Items Process

Your Task!

You are a Business Analyst (BA).1 Your boss (the CIO) wants you to improve the LCPL process(es) above

(figure 3). She wants you to examine:

- the current organizational structure (figures 1 and 2)

- the current operational process (figure 3) and staffing (table 3)

- how staff interact currently as seen in the SNA graph (figure 4) and

- from interviewing some of the staff (table 2)

Your job is assimilate the information given to you above (pages 2-7) and make some interpretive

judgements as to how the processes can be better aligned in LCPL. Although figure 4 illustrates all the actors

in the system, you are free as business analysts to re-work these relationships (figure 4) and processes (figure

3).

Implement the above scenario in BPM 4.2 or Adonis or other BPM software of your choosing. Modify

the processes. As a BA how would you improve the processes? What would you add, what would you take

away? Explain your assumptions. You do not need to conduct SNA modelling.

You will then take your BPM model, screen-dump it, with your costings in to a report and discuss what you

have done. The report need not be longer than 2,000 words.

Steps

1. Read pages 335-340 (section 12.6 - 12.7) with regard to BPMN (Papazoglou and Ribbers, 2006). These

pages are included with this assignment.

2. The existing processes (table 4) is to be modeled as the As-Is Process (along the lines shown in figure 5)

using BPM 4.2 (or other software) and a To-Be process model (ADF Diagram) produced.

a. Comparative metrics such as process cost and time are to be derived for both processes.2

b. You can make the following assumptions:

As-Is and To-Be process is typical of one cycle.

Costs in the To-Be process are only a preliminary feasibility and do not have to be highly

accurate.

c. Use your initiative to modify processes document your reasons.

Save the results of this process as your <.org> BPM file. Provide some examples of the metric

(tabulated) data calculated in BPM as well. Show the results of this process into the

appropriate section of the file as well.

1 Not the BA shown in the SNA graph or business workflow.

2 You determine the costs and time for your metrics (practicals weeks 2-4).

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Deliverables

Soft copy only

1. The BPM <.org> file

2. One file as a report explaining what you have done etc. (2,000 words).

a. The file should include detailed calculations/supporting data which could be relegated to

appendices. Use connectors in your ADF diagrams and export to your document using screen shots

(PrtSc).

Submission

3. Place your soft copies (2 files) in the appropriate submission folder on iLearn.

DUE: 11.55pm, Friday 16th September.