Introduction to

Management in IT
Lecture 3

Communication
Process modeling

Tomasz Bogucki
 Information
Relations
Engagement

Communication needs Feedback

Boss Customers

Partners
Manager Contract

Team Business
environment
Communication media
• Speak and listen
• Meetings, tele- and video-conferences
• Conferences and industry groups

• E-mail (common, difficult to track, easy to lose, delivery may be unreliable)

• Instant messaging (much as above, but improves team work, eg. Skype, Jabber, …)

• Issue and project tracking systems (Jira, Redmine, Asana, Trello…)

• Collaboration platforms (Google docs, Office 365, …)
• CRM (customer relationship management systems)
Important messages should be retraceable (hard copy, archived)
Meetings
• Meetings can be held for:
• Information exchange
• Brainstorming, option evaluation, or design
• Decision making

• Balance between information/integrity/solving and time wasting (agenda, duration, invitations)

• Plan – good practices for effective meetings:
• Status meetings should have regular times (eg. every Monday 9:00 – 10:00)
• Agenda should be sent to all invited in advance (1 day…1 month), ask for complementing
• Agenda should not change during meeting - only listed items should be discussed (avoid spontaneity)
• Ask guests to be prepared and have ideas/answers ready
• Issues not engaging everybody should be discussed separately
• Prepare for various scenarios – have answers ready, don’t improvise

• Decisions/Tasks – always decide WHO and WHEN.

• Formal notes – only what was said during meeting, sent no later than 24h after
Data privacy
• Classified data
• Your company’s (eg. contracts, financial data, passwords, source codes)
• Your customer’s (eg. know-how, their customers, real data for tests, network topology, passwords)

• Standards on handling classified data (eg. ISO/IEC 27001)

• As a minimum follow these rules (and make sure the team does as well):
• Store all classified data on server or on encrypted media
• Ask customer to exchange e-mail using encryption (eg. PGP, GPG), at least encrypt attachments
• Use “minimum access policy” (give access only to resources necessary to each team member)
• Do not leave classified printouts unattended (clean desk policy)
• Do not speak about business if strangers may hear (eg. In train, restaurant)
• Destroy all unnecessary information after project ends (also test environments)
 I don’t want to
Business operations take care of each
detail everyday!
Processes

- off your head

Customer
Team service

New Responsibility
recruit and claims

Knowledge
Manager
and best
Activities practices
Business processes
• Process: a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular result
• Business processes are ment to be repeatable and performed each time the same way
• Complex processes may divide into sub-processes (top- / low-level)
• A set of processes creates a system
• Can be understood as an instruction on how the company works
• Procedure: a prescribed way of undertaking a process (or part of a process)
• Description methods: list, diagram, application workflow
• Should cover at least critical activities (highest values, most risk, quality assurance)
• Processes should
• reflect actual activities - as how they are done in real life
• should cover all options and exceptions
• need to be optimal / follow best practices
• need to adapt (but in a managed manner)
Defining processes - reasons
• Manage chaos
• Ensuring optimal effectiveness – process describes the best way to use resources
• Save time, use less resources – reduce costs
• Do more in the same time with the same team – increase performance
• Ensuring proper quality –process describes the best way to reach satisfying results
• Learn from mistakes and do not repeat them
• Build professionalism
• Standard activities can be safely done without management supervision
• Gain resistance (eg. in case of employee leaving)
• Attributes responsibility
• Easy to onboard new employees
• Enables to manage change of the organization
Processes – the downside
• Employees do not follow procedures, because:
• They are not aligned with real life activities
• They are to complex, time consuming, unnecessary
• They became obsolete

• Procedures may make the organization inflexible

• Decisions take long, no ad-hoc short cuts or exceptions
• Loose drive for innovation – people prefer to blindly follow procedures

• Optimizing processes and changing procedures requires effort

• Easier not to optimize even when everyone sees there is a waste
• Easier to ignore the procedure

• Defining, controlling, optimizing, changing … - takes time, money, people

Areas
Examples for an IT business: Support functions: Search internet
• Production • Accounting for ready process
• Version planning frameworks for
• Design • IT infrastructure software
• Construction • Ensuring availability engineering
• Testing • Ensuring recovery
• Deployment • Data security
• Maintenance/customer care
• HR (human resources)
• Sales
• Offering • Legal services
• Contracts
• Procurement
• Strategy
• Monitoring competition
• Market assessment
Processes - design
• Take a top-down approach (general steps first,
details later)
• Determine the input (event) and output (result), as
well as the purpose
• List all the activities need to be done between
input and output
• Remember to associate roles (who does the
activity), as well as place and time
• First focus on the default path
 Sub-process A

W7
Processes - design
A
• Expand complex routines into sub-levels,
sub-levels are described the same way
• Add options and exceptions
• Try to design measures for collecting
performance statistics
• Add documents and attachments:
• Input examples
• Output forms
K4
Processes - design
• Use a standard notation
• eg. BPMN for the flow
• Use document templates (unique look)
• Should be understandable and easy to use
• Use common vocabulary across all documents
• User friendly
• Level of detail depends on the case
• Too much or too little detail is both wrong
• Two people following the same procedure should do
it the same way
• Should be easily accessible (eg. Intranet)
 BPMN Notation for process modelling (selected)

Message
Pool
flow

Lane End event

Event 

Activity 

Flow 

Artifact
Gateway
(annotation)

Source: www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0/examples
Managing processes
• Processes should change with time:
• Accommodate real life requirements and changes
• Be optimized
• Follow change in company strategy or priorities

• Each process needs to have an Owner

• The Process Owner collects change requests or suggests such changes
• Reaching agreement he introduces changes to the procedures

• The release of a new process version needs to be planned

• Might involve changing other processes or associated documents at the same time
• May need a training session

• Documents should include a metric describing:

• Version, date
• Author
• Changes and purpose
Optimizing processes
• Processes should reflect the best way to achieve a result:
• Least resources and costs
• Shortest time
• Best quality, least risk, customer value
• Fulfilling all above objectives usually is not possible – balance as needed

• Optimizing means:
• Reducing waste
• Avoiding errors, adding quality assurance (QA), eg. tests, checklists

• Sources of optimization:
• Observation
• Measurement
• Hired consultants
Optimizing cycle 1
Define a process
Define how to measure
1
2
Define
Measure and gather statistics

3
5 2
Analyze data
Control Measure
Find better solutions, savings
Check advantages and disadvantages
Managed cycle
4
Rewrite procedures
4 3 Implement new procedures within the organization
Improve Analyze
5
Control that procedures are obeyed
Look for further improvement
Process optimization is also a process
Finding improvement
• Analyze each step of the process
• Are there bottlenecks?
• Excessive costs?
• Poorly executed? Creates risk?

• Each decision point

• Is it necessary?
• Is it in the right place of the process?

• Each loop (return)

• Can it be eliminated or cut shorter?

• Each activity
• Does it create enough value?
• Can it be done faster or with less resources?
• Can it be simplified, automated?
 Example:

“5 Times Why” method • Why are customers dissatisfied with the

mobile app quality and stop using it?
by Sakichi Toyoda
Because of crashes
• Metod of finding root causes of problems • Why does the app crash?

• Each answer is a basis for the next Because it has a

memory corruption issue on some devices
question
• Why has it not been found and fixed?
• Distinguish causes from symptoms
It is not tested on all devices
• 5 is a said average number of questions • Why isn’t it tested on all devices?
needed to reveal the root cause
Because it is complex to
• There may be more than one root cause have all kinds of devices and run multiple tests
of the problem, revealed by a different set • Why has no one looked for a solution?
of questions
Because time to market and cost
• The blame should not focus on a person reductions where more important than quality
assurance
but on a faulty process
• Conclusion: change priorities in product
strategy (quality), implement full tests
Eliminating waste
Common examples:
• Work is passed between many workers or departments:
time is wasted, information is being lost, fuzzy
responsibility
• Bad work organization: tasks wait in queues, delays in
passing work
• Less important activities consume disproportionate
resources
• Activities that do not create value for end customers
• Correctional activities, which would be avoided if the
process was organized in a different way
Waste in software engineering
Examples:
• Eliminating rework • Team management
• Monitoring performance
• Gathering proper requirements
• Balancing team workload
• Including end customers in product
reviews • Interruptions (hardware failures,
technology roadblocks, knowledge
• Limiting software bugs shortages)
• Defining test scenarios • Dealing with employee absence
• Automated testing

• Eliminating deployment errors • Project management

• Build instructions • Proper planning
• Checklists
Measurement 
• Gather statistics
• Have standards, use benchmarks
• Compare and analyze outliers
 
KPI (key performance indicator) examples:
• Time • Quality
• To complete the full process or each • Customer satisfaction (eg. surveys)
activity of the process
• Number of errors/faults
• Number od deadlines exceeded
• Rework time in %
• Time of delay between activities
• System availability vs. downtime
• Costs
• Value of resources used
• Performance (eg. people per activity)
Risks related to setting poor KPIs
Each KPI on its own may be appropriate, but combined into a full system can be
inconsistent and become counterproductive.
Examples of counterproductive KPIs:
- developers are accounted for meeting deadlines
result: work done on time but with many defects
- testers are accounted for finding maximum number of bugs
result: testers report every minor bug causing returns for fixes,
report every bug separately not looking for root cause
Correct:
- developers are accounted for meeting deadlines including bugfixing
- testers are accounted for positive customer satisfaction
KPI’s are often connected to a bonus scheme to build motivation
 A.V. Feigenbaum:

Using processes to improve quality “Quality is a customer

determination, not an
engineer's determination,
• Processes inforce following best practices not a marketing
determination, nor a general
• Processes should be modified to: management determination.
• Eliminate sources of errors and mistakes It is based on the
• Eliminate customer dissatisfaction customer's actual
• Poor communication, customer service, product quality experience with the
product or service,
• Increase positive customer experience
measured against his or her
• Include product and relations improvement requirements - stated or
• Research, feedback unstated, conscious or
Ask if any merely sensed, technically
further help
needed
operational or entirely
Send quality
Answer call survey subjective - and always
within 3 rings
representing a moving
target in a competitive
market.”