Process maps

Process maps are visual representations of business processes. Processes are composed of individual steps or activities, and the conditions or decisions that dictate when these steps and activities occur. Use process maps to document your current business processes, or to plan for future business process transformation.

Process maps represent the set of activities that make up a defined business process, and the order that they occur in. The activities can be composed of sub-activities and decisions, or can themselves be process maps that have already been built. For example, in the following Hiring Process map, the Post job activity consists of two sub-activities, Write Job Description and Post on JobNews.

You might also have an activity that calls another process, for example, the Hiring Process above might be called by a larger process for opening a new branch for an organization.

Each activity can have owners assigned to it, specifying either the person or team that performs that activity, or the person or team that makes sure an activity is completed.

You can specify inputs for an activity, representing the data or business context that is necessary for the activity to begin. For example, you might require an approved hiring request form before the Post job activity can begin.

The output of an activity is the result of the activity completion. For example, the output of the Collect resumes activity might be the candidate list that is passed along to the next activity. The output of the last activity in the process can be considered the output of the entire process.

You can also represent decisions within the execution path of your process. For example, a hiring process may take a slightly different path for internal candidates than it does for external candidates, perhaps interviewing candidates on-site in the case of internal candidates, but off-site in the case of external candidates.

Example Process map showing decision

In some cases, you might have activities or entire processes that feed into a business measure or performance indicator that has been defined in a related strategy map. You can add a link to this measure from the activity or from the entire map.

After creating your process map, you can export to Microsoft PowerPoint for review, or you can export it to WebSphere Business Modeler for further refinement and automation.