Confirming Analysis › Refining the Project Plan › Selecting Elementary Processes to Implement

Selecting Elementary Processes to Implement

You need to confirm the continued business benefit of providing information system support to all elementary processes. If their implementation cannot be justified, they should be removed from the implementation plan.

The technique for identifying low-benefit processes is straightforward, requiring the following steps:

1. Before changing the implementation plan, check Dependency Diagrams to discover if processes of otherwise questionable benefit may be a prerequisite to many high-benefit processes; such processes should remain in the plan.
2. Review the clustered Entity Type/Elementary Process Matrix and the Process/Role Matrix for the remaining questionable processes, to determine whether failure to implement any of the processes will result in logical inconsistency.

   For example, if a low-benefit process creates an entity later referenced by many high-benefit processes, the cost of not implementing the process may be greater than the cost of implementing it.

   Omission of low benefit processes may weaken data or process support for a role that performs high-benefit processes.

3. Review current system and data assessments and matrices against the data and elementary processes supported by those systems. This type of review is described in the chapter titled "Analyzing Current Systems."

   These assessments and matrices may indicate that data is already available and does not need new system support to maintain it.

   Any elementary processes that exist only to maintain that data may be removed from the implementation plan.

4. Developers specifying business systems to be implemented in a client/server environment may find it useful to review the clustered Entity Type/Elementary Process Matrix for opportunities to improve data and system reuse.
5. It may be found that:
   • Processes closely clustered by their creation and maintenance of data widely used by many other processes are candidates for support by business systems that include server procedures, which can be used by many client procedures.
   • Processes that need many entity types (possibly created by several different clusters) are candidates for support by business systems composed of client procedures that reuse data maintained by a combination of current systems and provided by common server procedures.