1. Organizational analysis
In the previous chapter, we introduced three different perspectives to analyze processes: organizational, control-flow, and performance. In this chapter, we will look into each of these with more detail. Let's start by look at the organizational aspects of the process!
2. Looking at the actors in the process
A process, no matter how much it is automated, will always depend on the resources, the actors who are getting things done. Even in very structured processes, idiosyncratic decisions or habits of staff members will always have a profound impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of the process. Typical questions to answer in this context are: Who is active in the process? Who is specialized in performing a certain task? Is there a risk of brain drain? How is work handed over between employees? Etc. Understanding these phenomena is key in resolving efficiency issues but also in improving knowledge management.
3. Data: Hospital process
In this lesson, we will be looking into the organizational structure at the emergency department of a small hospital.
4. Who executes the work?
In order to know who executes the work, we can take a look at the resource labels, using the resource_labels function.
We can see that there are 12 resources in this example process: doctors, nurses, clercks and an emergency crew.
5. Who executes the work?
Using the resources function, we can create a table of resources which includes more information. This shows us that the doctors are the most active participants in the process, though not all equally so. The emergency crew on the other hand is less involved in the process.
6. Resource-activity Matrix
Once we know the resources which are active in the process, the next step is to look at their relationship with the activities. We do this by creating a so-called "resource-activity" matrix. In this matrix, we put different resources on one dimension and activities on the other dimension. In the matrix, we can then indicate which of the resource activity combinations occur in our process, using different sort of frequencies.
We can then identify interesting patterns, namely specialization and brain drain.
7. Specialization and brain drain
When a person performs relatively few activities, we can say that this person is specialized, like person 3 and 4 in this example. Knowing the specializations of your work-force is very important from a knowledge management perspective: knowing who to go to for a specific issue, or knowing who to enlist for specific trainings.
8. Specialization and brain drain
On the other hand, it can also occur that only one person is in charge of a certain activity, like the forth activity in this example. This presents an important risk in terms of knowledge retention: if the person leaves the company, you might suffer an important loss of knowledge concerning this step of the process.
9. Resource activity matrix
The resource activity matrix can be constructed using the resource_frequency function in combination with the level argument resource-activity. The result can also be visualized with the generic plot function.
10. Resource activity matrix: example
Looking at the resource activity matrix in our hospital, we see that things are neatly organized: each type of actor has its own specializations, doing at most 4 different activities. Furthermore, each activity is executed by more than one employee, which means there is no immediate brain drain risk.
11. Who transfers work to whom?
By creating a handover-of-work network, or "resource map" we can see how cases are given from one person to the next.
This example shows the activity on a specific day. We see a lot of arrows between all actors, which means that there are few favored paths. Instead everyone of the department is equally involved in the process.
The higher amount of arrows going to the doctors indicates that they are important resources who are governing the process.
12. Let's practice!
Let's have a look at some exercises!