Process

From Ron B Palmer's Wiki     Home > ITSM > Definitions > Process

Introduction

The definition an organization chooses to use for process has significant impact on their ability to implement best practice and quality based improvements.  There are two commonly used definitions used in the ITSM community today.  The traditional definition of process lends itself to process mapping with a number of well-defined methodologies.  The other definition comes from ITIL and describes a collection of policies, guidlines, processes, activities, best practices, and miscellaneous concepts.  ITIL identifies quite a few processes under this definition such as Incident Management, Problem Management, etc.

The difficulty arises when people attempt to map one of ITIL's processes.  It becomes exceedingly difficult to separate the activities to be mapped from all of the miscellaneous stuff that is collected in ITIL's processes.  People tend to look for clearly defined inputs, outputs, and activities for each ITIL process and become confused when those items cannot be consistently found.

I hope that ITIL eventually sees fit to change its terminology to reduce the confusion.  What it describes as processes are more appropriately labeled "functions" or "systems," both of which more naturally contain all of the aditional items other than activities which ITIL's processes contain.  Clarifiying this issue should lead to better and faster understanding of ITIL by new practitioners.

Once the content sections are renamed, it becomes much easier to identify the many processes that should exist in each section.  There should be a core process, e.g. Manage Incidents and there should also be supporting processes, e.g. Manage Incident Categories, Manage Incident Reporting, etc.  Each of these processes should have clearly defined inputs, outputs, and activities.

If approached this way much of the other guidance in the sections becomes more clear.  Policies include boundaries (control points) in which processes are free to operate.  Best practice concepts are the foundational testable ideas upon which guidance is based.  Metrics much like control points predict the behavior of processes or judge the output.  Control loops provide the mechanism to adjust the working of the processes based on metrics.  Reporting is a method of communicating to management that processes are under control.

Understanding Processes

A cursory dictionary search on the term "process" produces many different definitions mostly related but adjusted to differing needs.  There are process definitions for anatomy, computing, engineering, science, industrial production, etc.  We in IT Management need to identify the appropriate definition to meet our needs. 

The most appropriate definition is one for "business process" which approaches process from the idea of organizing human activities in relation to generating valuable outputs.  The point of defining a business process is simply to better understand how we produce business value.  Dr. Deming said it best when he said, "if you can't describe what you are doing as a process then you don't know what you are doing."

What does it mean to describe something as a process?  It means that you follow a prescribed set of rules to convey specific information in a consistent manner.  Much like mathematics, process documentation provides a universal language.  Business processes provide a universal method for describing complex business endevors.  There are many widely used methodologies (sets of rules) for documenting and visually mapping processes, e.g. IDEF0, Business Process Modeling Notation, Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), Unified Modeling Language (UML), etc.

There is much discussion in IT Management circles about knowledge management and many people struggle with how to capture and share knowledge in the enterprise.  Process maps are a valuable way to capture knowledge about how the enterprise functions and to communicate it to others.  No enterprise knowledge management effort would be complete without documenting the enterprise's activities in terms of processes.

What are some of the key elements of a process that make it useful to IT Management?

• a process is a system of human activities ordered according to their position in space and time relative to the output they combine to produce.
• Processes have clear boundaries seperating what is inside the process and what is outside
  • Processes may contain activities
  • Processes may contain other processes
  • Everything else is outside
• Processes begin with clearly defined inputs and transform those inputs into clearly defined outputs
• Processes utilize resources which are outside of the process
• Processes provide opportunities for measurement
• Processes provide control points
• Processes may share information with other processes (calls)
• Processes can be mapped with commonly accepted process mapping methodologies

ITIL's definition

"A structured set of Activities designed to accomplish a specific Objective. A Process takes one or more defined inputs and turns them into defined outputs. A Process may include any of the Roles, responsibilities, tools and management Controls required to reliably deliver the outputs. A Process may define Policies, Standards, Guidelines, Activities, and Work Instructions if they are needed."

In this definition there are actually two definitions combined, which I believe is causing considerable confusion in the industry.

See Also

References

Rummler, Geary A., Brache, Alan P. (1995), Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart, ISBN: 0-7879-0090-7

Aguayo, Rafael (1990), Dr. Deming: The American Who Taught the Japanese About Quality, Foreword by W. Edwards Deming, ISBN: 0-671-74621-9

Lacy, Shirley, MacFarlane, Ivor (2007), Service Transition, OGC-ITIL, ISBN: 13: 9780113310456