Designing the System Structure › How to Analyze User Tasks › Map User Tasks to Elementary Processes

Map User Tasks to Elementary Processes

You can now map the sub-tasks to the elementary processes you defined in analysis. This mapping may not be directly one-to-one. It depends on the granularity of the user task structure.

The following illustration shows some possibilities available to you:

Notes:

• A complete user task (such as Task A) may map to an elementary process in one instance, or its sub-tasks (as in Task B) may map to several elementary processes.
• A task (such as Task C) may need to be implemented as several procedures, each of which may support a specific sub-task.
• If a task or sub-task (such as Task D) does not map to an elementary process, this could indicate that the user task or sub-task should be implemented as a designer-added procedure, or that a change to the Analysis model needs to be negotiated.
• Other designer-added procedures (such as Procedure F) may not directly support any user tasks. Such a procedure may instead support business logic (such as calculate tax) defined in a common action block, rather than a process.
• Alternatively the procedure may be a system control procedure; if neither of these is the case, you should check carefully for missing user tasks.
• It is possible that the user task as performed is unnecessary. This should have been confirmed during analysis, or during business process re-engineering. Discuss any doubts with appropriate users.
• Sometimes a process, such as Process E, has no single directly correlating user task. This may indicate that not all user tasks have yet been identified, or the process may be concerned with maintaining data that will be used by many tasks or sub-tasks. Such a process may typically be mapped to a server procedure, which will be used by client procedures that do directly support user tasks.

There may still be elementary processes, such as Process F, that are not mapped to any user tasks. You should discover the cause and take corrective action along the following lines:

• The scope of the business system is incorrect, and the elementary processes should be included in a business system.
• An insufficient or inappropriate cross-section of the user community has been interviewed. Identified and interviewed those users who do perform the corresponding user tasks.
• A new elementary process was identified as desirable during analysis, or in business process re-engineering, but is not yet performed; this requires that user tasks be designed to support it.
• An elementary process does not apply to the user community to be supported.
• An elementary process identified during analysis no longer needs to be performed. This situation requires that the analysis model and requirements for the system be amended and reconfirmed.