Importance of Business Process Documentation in Software Evaluations

When it comes to software evaluation projects, there is one key activity that should never be underestimated – business process documentation.

Business process documentation is critical for communicating what functionality your business really requires from a new system. It reflects the specific needs of your business users and ensures that the functional “end to end” and integration requirements of the organisation are well understood by prospective vendors.

Without appropriately detailed documentation, the project team can lose focus on the core requirements of the business and there may be ambiguity regarding the scope of the project, what the vendor is expected to deliver and what the business is hoping to achieve.

Some organisations take an approach of documenting the “as is” and the “to be” processes using MS Visio diagrams or similar programs, however, we have seen that these diagrams do not enable the vendors to understand the core requirements of the business. They also do not provide support for managing scope and often reflect a view of the past rather than a view of what the business is hoping to improve in the future.

CMC’s Unique Method – Business Scenarios

CMC uses a unique concept called Business Scenarios to document the needs of our clients before we begin looking at potential vendors or solutions. Business Scenarios describe the “end to end” processes for each functional area of the business in plain English, so that vendors are able to understand the specific requirements of the business.

We schedule and facilitate Business Scenario Workshops with the Business Process Owners (BPO) from the various functional areas of the organisation. We begin with a master set of 100+ business scenarios templates and work collaboratively with the BPOs to refine and agree one way of doing things across the company.  The starting point is a curated selection of all the relevant templates ready to be considered by the BPOs for refinement to reflect their business.

We refer to this as a Common Operating Model (COM) of the business. The COM is a common reference, a common process that will be adopted across the company. Staff may be in different offices, states or countries but they will all be encouraged to follow the agreed COM processes.