Question

When a company identifies and documents requirements for a business process improvement project, they should consider exactly what needs to be documented and at what level of detail. Requirements can be business or technical. Deciding what is too much detail or too little depends on the specific business process improvement project and the needs of the project stakeholders. Spending the time to document the process improvement requirements during the planning phase of a project saves time, frustration, and rework during project execution. An organization considering a process improvement initiative should document the requirements of the As-Is environment, and then, based on that analysis, proceed to document the To-Be environment. The As-Is environment considers how the processes are currently completed; the To-Be environment reflects how the processes will look once the processes have been improved.

For this Discussion:

• Select two tools for identifying and documenting requirements that would be effective to use for a business process improvement project. One technique should address documenting requirements in the As-Is environment, and the second technique should address documenting requirements for the To-Be environment.
• Briefly describe each of the tools you chose.
• What is your rationale for your choice of tools?
• In what ways do the tools you chose support stakeholder understanding of the business process?
• In what ways do the tools you chose support stakeholder validation of the business process?

Answer 1

Answer:- Here is your answer..

1) Any project needs the current information available to understand the current state ( example in manufacturing we do Value Stream Mapping current state to understand the flow of information from customer to supplier) , so in any organisation when ever you start project, the customer need and demand to be understand and accordingly what process and information followed to be mapped or plotted.( for example if any new project is handover to you, what will be your first step? you will take all the available information from the team and try to understand the flow of information and processes before start working on it)

That current state is called As-Is environment or As -Is Analysis, there are several ways of getting this information like:

• Interviewing the team as they have all information and data about the project
• observing the process (for example if its manufacturing plant , so you need to observe the making of product through various processes to understand the time taken by each process and operator to finish the task that will give you lead time)
• Roles and task assigned to the team, available time , processing time of each person/machine/process.
• Analyse the process flow or information flow

Steps used to identify the requirement of business process improvement , DMAIC(define-measure-analyse-improve-control)

identifying the requirement is comes in define phase, several tools required to define the project one of is Process Mapping(SIPOC analysis), which is As-Is environment tool

Another Tool is cause and effect analysis, which is also To-Be Environment tool to understand the problems and lacks in current state and to make another future state.

SIPOC (Supplier-Input-Process-Output-Customer)its a mapping of activities done by each.

for example you ordered a cake from cake shop:SIPOC is

supplier	input	process	output	customer
cake shop	raw material for cake(milk, cream, chocolate , color, equipments, tools etc)	process of making the cake(mixing-grinding-pasting-decorating)	cake	you

Another tool Cause and Affect analysis(TO-BE Tool), take SIPOC as input of current state to make future state

4M required for the process of making a cake are Man, material, method & machine

MAN	People who do all processes of making cake
METHOD	specific methods of preparing specific cakes
MATERIAL	all the raw material
MACHINE	any equipment like oven or microwave used to prepare cake

than do cause and effect analysis on 4M for example

the taste is not as per the requirement

now all the factors involved for taste are ( method , manpower, , environment & material ) now check all these to understand the problem.

2) I chose these tools because they are the basics to understand the process, SIPOC analysis will give you the idea of the process and once you understand the information flow and data required, you can figure the pitfall and even missing information from the process , choosing cause and effect analysis because it the intense tool to undersvsd the problem and than to analyse it with all aspect , and it need a lot of brainstorming and a complete functional team effort ,s o you need to involve all the team not just a individual in both of these tools, and that was my basic approach to involve team to get the best solution.

3) Stakeholders are the people who get affected from your project/process, so these tools will give you the requirement of stakeholder , doing SIPOC is to do interviewing your stakeholders too and they will get a clear picture of the process and the supplier input used in your project, same for cause and affect analysis , stakeholder can understand the effect of the aspects of 4M's and even external and internal environment on the process and you can convince them with facts and figures.

4)These tools are prepared with real available data, so they are not assumed , they have facts and validated data , for example you will make calculate the percent of effect on your cause in cause and effect analysis and accordingly you will take measures, so they are vallidating tools.