For over 20 years, the team of experts at Sparx Services North America has taught people how to model business processes, data flows, and system interactions. We’ve trained thousands of practitioners to use modeling languages like BPMN, ArchiMate, UML, and SysML. We’ve worked with architecture standards organizations like The Open Group, Object Management Group, and Business Architecture Guild to develop the best practices architects use every day.
With our process modeling service, a lead architect from our consulting team will work with you to define a scope for the modeling effort. Our lead architect will conduct a series of discovery workshops with your business and IT stakeholders to understand the way your processes are operating today, pain points, and undocumented workarounds. We’ll review any existing process documentation, solution diagrams, and data integration information (even if it is outdated, it is still a valuable reference). The lead architect will then work with our team of modelers to diagram out the processes identify any system dependencies, interactions, and data flow within the process. We will also capture those if there is decision logic, approvals, or control points in the process.
At the end of the project, you will be presented with a complete picture of your business process, including process diagrams, system inventory, data elements, and various matrices that map the People, Processes, Tools, and Data together. We will also provide you with a set of observations about the process, where there are observed issues, inefficiencies, and suggestions on how you might improve them in the future. We will provide the process models both in the form of reports (PDF and images) and a proper architecture model that can be loaded into Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect for your team to maintain easily. With these insights, you will be enabled to make better-informed decisions regarding process improvements, application investment/retirement, and business process improvements.
It depends on the scope of the business processes you are seeking to model, how detailed you want the models to be, what ancillary views you are looking for and the availability of your staff to participate in discovery workshops. Stakeholder involvement is key to a successful outcome. A typical Process Modeling project will take between 6 weeks and three months to complete. We don’t recommend compressing the project to a shorter timeline because it limits the inputs and feedback from stakeholders. A modeling project that goes longer than three months is likely to encounter process changes/evolution while the project is going on and stakeholder fatigue. If the scope you are looking to model will require a longer timeline than three months, we recommend breaking the effort into smaller chunks.
That is fine. This modeling service is delivered virtually using our collaboration platform. It doesn’t matter if the workshop participants and stakeholders are co-located, distributed across sites, working from home or a combination – we are experts at doing architecture remotely.
Access to your corporate systems is not required; however, subject matter experts are essential for valuable strategic insights. The majority of the data collection and discovery in a process modeling engagement is done through interviews and screen sharing sessions. We will ask your SMEs to explain and/or show us what they do so we can get a first-hand view into how the process works. Documentation that you share via email and all work products will be managed in a secure repository and destroyed at the conclusion of the project.
Absolutely! The Process Modeling Service is designed to help companies capture the current state of their organization’s processes. While it is important to know how things work today, the real value comes from what happens next. How are you going to use this information to drive change, whether that be to cut costs, improve productivity, transform your business, launch a new product/service offering or ensure compliance with regulatory requirements? Sparx Services North America has a Solution Modeling Service designed to help you with this stage in a similar outsourced project structure, leveraging our team of architecture experts but focused on the future. The Solution Modeling Service is slightly different because it combines modeling with architecture design – integrating considerations like technology standards, IT security, separation of duties, decision-making authorities, and operational supportability, which need to be factored into any change initiative.