COEPD – Center of Excellence for Professional Development Happy Learning
Work flow analysis helps to analyze the flow of information that is used to complete a process that may involve multiple people, technologies and tasks. Work flow analysis can be done by identifying sequence of actions performed by the system to accomplish a task by considering set of controls, conditions and events involved in the process. Workflow analysis helps to analyze risks in the process and gives overall idea of the architecture to be designed.
Workflows represent graphical representations which contain sequence of actions or events, controls and condition statements. Usually as a Business analyst, we represent workflows by activity diagrams.
A Business analyst or project manager also analyses the workflow representing Gantt chart. A Gant chart is also known as work breakdown structure as it breaks the process into simple activities. A Gantt Chart is a bar chart used for visually representing a project’s schedule. It is used in project management for illustrating tasks or activities in relation to time. In very simple terms, a Gantt Chart shows which tasks need to be completed and when they must be completed.
| Activity | Predecessor | Time estimates | Expected time (TE) | ||
| Opt. (O) | Normal (M) | Pess. (P) | |||
| A | — | 2 | 4 | 6 | 4.00 |
| B | — | 3 | 5 | 9 | 5.33 |
| C | a | 4 | 5 | 7 | 5.17 |
| D | a | 4 | 6 | 10 | 6.33 |
| E | b, c | 4 | 5 | 7 | 5.17 |
| F | d | 3 | 4 | 8 | 4.50 |
| G | e | 3 | 5 | 8 | 5.17 |
The effective way of analyzing work flow is interviewing the employee who performs that task or SME who has experience in it.
Below are few steps to gather and analyze the work flow
- What process to be used and the reason for using that particular process. What is the current performance level
- What are the dependencies that each task has to complete
- What are the constraints to develop a module
- What are the business rules
- How a process is controlled
- What is the cost for using particular process
- Identify the Hand offs to analyze the sequence of actions.
By answering the above questions, one can get complete analysis of work flow.
