Declan Chellar

When we are involved in producing a piece of software, it’s easy to forget that we are not simply building a product: we are implementing a change in the way a company operates. Change is unnerving. We all know that. I know it particularly because I started losing my hair when I was eighteen. Changes [...]

You may have noticed the emphasis I place on visual modelling, which is fancy for “drawing pictures”. People can relate to pictures better than text in many contexts. Can you imagine an architect trying to document his building design textually? Unlike architectural drawings for a building, business analysis models are not literal. As such they [...]

In Part 4 we drew both high level and low level versions of the To Be model of our customer’s change control process, based on the information we noted in Part 3. We are now ready to drive out and document high level system requirements (HLSRs). It is these requirements that will form the scope [...]

In Part 3, we identified problems with the As Is process by interviewing out fictional customers individually and by having a group workshop. We did this in the light of the strategic objectives of the business. We need to restructure the As Is model to take into account these problems and objectives. Firstly, we produce [...]

In Part 2 we took a moment to remind ourselves that the customer owns the process and that we must be sensitive to that. Having been presented with a documented As Is change control process, we must investigate what the stakeholders think about that process. There are different techniques available to us. One-to-one interviews are [...]

In Part 1 we took a look at a sample As Is change control business process as presented to us by our fictional customer. The customer owns the process Our next goal is to produce a To Be model by improving on the As Is model. However, the worst thing we could do is stomp [...]

In a previous series of posts we took a look at drawing workflows. However, before you draw a workflow, you really have to understand the underlying business process. Remember that our definition of a workflow referred specifically to the identified work object. This is because the workflow does not cover the entire business process but [...]

I was between two minds about writing this post. After all, everyone knows that change control is important, don’t they? Then I remembered a couple of interesting cases where people did not seem to know that. In one case, a junior programmer had developed a very good rapport with one of the customers, a desirable [...]

In this, the year of world-wide recession and the bicentennial year of the birth of Charles Darwin, let us all remember that “survival of the fittest” does not mean “survival of the strongest”. It means: “survival of the most adaptable”. By the way, I am aware that it was Herbert Spencer who first used the [...]

Business Process Management (BPM) is partly about change and managing your response to it. Still, it’s human nature to cling to old ways and old myths. As the ability of science to scan the brain improves, we are dispelling more and more myths about how people behave. Dr. Ellen Weber exposes ten classics. Don’t just [...]