Have you ever wondered why process models in your organisations are not that useful? Are your process models not being used by that many people? You’re not alone. Today I am going to be talking about 10 steps you can undertake so you can get your modeling practice into shape.
There are a total of 10 things you can do in your modeling practice that will shape it all up and put you back on the path for success. We call this Process Modeling Excellence and in Leonardo Consulting, we have meticulously developed this foundation on so much of experience that we’ve had and proven methodologies we’ve established.
1. The Purpose of Modeling
Without the purpose, I wouldn’t event start any kind of effort in the modeling space. You need to set your bedrock that will have all of the other aspects built on top of it. There are two aspects of purpose that most people usually discuss:
- Communication &
- Improvement
So if you’re doing process models for either of these things, you’re on the right track.
2. The Scope of Modeling
This defines the left and right limit of process modeling effort. This is important because you can process model until the cows come home – but you don’t want to do that. You want to define what your team does. So it’s important to get that right. There are techniques that I will discuss in my upcoming videos that help you do this.
3. The Depth of Modeling
This talks about the granularity and the amount of detail you need to put into your to make them useful and valuable.
4. Resolve the Modeler’s Dilemma
This is looked at as a balancing act of three quality issues;
- how well does it describe reality?,
- how well does the process model conform to the standards the organization has subscribed to?
- and how useful is this process model or how fit for purpose is it?
We talk through ways we can help you balance three aspects.
5. Design and Use of Conventions
This is an essential part of ensuring this consistency across the hundred and thousands of models you create. You don’t want everyone to have their own creative flair in producing different models as you go.
6. Reuse Process Models
Every organization has methodologies they follow. For example project management has a methodology they follow. Have you ensured that process modeling is part of that methodology? I can think of hundreds of other methodologies that are in place in organizations that you can then reply on and tap into.
7. The Role of Process Architecture
I cannot emphasize this enough. If you’re creating models out of nothing, autonomously, then you’re in trouble. You need to put models into an architecture and what that simply means is a relationship between one model and another model such as hand-offs and value chains. Think of it as eco-system of process models.
8. Govern the lifecycle
The lifecyle of any process model goes through three key steps; creation, review and consumption. These three steps are pretty simple but you need proper discipline to implement them.
9. The Model Quality Framework
It’s no good if you just have process models floating in mid-air without any real rigour around how good the process model is. Rigour is much better if you do it quantitatively. So we present a framework that you can use from a quantitative perspective. In other words, use numbers of quantify how good a process model is. That will give you a good judge about how good the model can be.
10. Sell the Benefits of Process Modeling
There are many ways in which this can be done and by far this the most difficult categories we encounter. I will show you ways in our upcoming tutorials on how you can tackle the sale of model benefits. Notice I didn’t say ‘selling of the models’ – it’s the benefits you can offer.
So there you have it: 10 things you can do to improve your modeling practice and get on with modeling excellence.
