In life there are things that you cannot control, like the weather or the release of the next iPhone. Fortunately enough, there are things that you can, like process models. Imagine a world where everyone creates process models and there are lots and lots of people who submit in all this data into a central location. What you're gonna end up with very quickly is a mess. You don't have to imagine this. It happens right now. I share with you three very simple steps you can undertake to ensure that you've got a robust governance structure to handle this mess.
In the world of process modeling, it's often the case that a lot of people create lots of good content. Everyone has the right intention. They want valuable models, they want useful stuff, and most importantly, they want to contribute. However, very quickly, when there's a lot of people involved in creating process models, you end up with a big mess. One way to handle that big mess is to understand some structures and place some measures that you, as a leader, in this space can ensure that the content that is produced is still valuable, useful, and well-understood by everyone who use it. So here are the three steps that you can undertake to ensure good governance across process model creation.
When you create process models, and in any kind of exercise you can do creation in the form of process discovery, you can do creating in the form of documentation, or just in the form of a design workshop. When you get all this information as a modeler, you put it into a tool or transfer it onto paper or whatever means you document your process models. That's the create bit. Once that is completely done, you're going to send this process model out for a review.
The review process, which is number two, takes care of ensuring quality is injected into those process models. Every review goes through three key steps: semantics, syntactic, and pragmatic. Semantic meaning accuracy, syntactic meaning conformance to our standards, pragmatic being fit for purpose. These three checks are performed either by a peer or by a system, or a combination of the two. And there's that back and forth between the modeler and the reviewing system. Once the review is passed, these process models then head on to the next phase, which is publish.
The publish phase is a very simple step of ensuring that these process models, which are now of high quality and determined to be correct and accurate, can now be shared with the community so the consumption of these models can continue. Most organizations employ a tool of some sort to enable them to do this, but there are many other ways to do so.
So in conclusion, every process model that you create and a group of people create can end up being a huge mess. And that'll lead to models that are not accurate, not well understood. You don't want that. You want to set in strong governance structure that'll ensure that every process model that you and your team and all the modelers in your organization create is of high quality so it's well understood, well used, and accurate. To do this effectively, employ the three steps that we just discussed; create, review, and publish, on your way to a better future with many, many more valuable models.