Hi,
I’ve been asked to assist in documenting the current processes of the marketing dept for a fairly large firm, more specifically what the marketing reps do. It begins with identifying the customer and ends with the customer purchasing a service. The reps use a no. of research tools/services to id potential customers.. The reps meet with the customer several times before the sales is made; more research may be conducted throughout. After the sales is complete the reps often try to get the same customers to buy additional services. They also conduct marketing seminars to peak the customers' interests.
Would the business processes consist of 1)research, 2) customer list maintenance, 3)seminars, 4)make the sales? I'm unsure if Research and Customer List Maintenance are bus. processes since all processes require input and output.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Larry
Hi Larry,
A process is the act of doing something to/with something. With that in mind you should be able to name all processes as a verb and a noun - doing something to something. You said "It begins with identifying the customer and ends with the customer purchasing a service" so you have at least 2 top level process steps of "identify customer" and "sell service". Inbetween you seem to have "research customer services", "meet customers", and afterwards "offer additional services".
You might want to start with a context diagram of some sort to scope the functional boundry of what you are analysing and then decompose the context in to processes at the level I suggested above.
Before progressing too much further with this though it would be good to know why you have been asked to do this in order to define what information you need to capture - for example is it just processes that are required, or who is performing them as well, at what physical locations, using what tools and services and needing what data. What information is needed should be driven by why the model is being constructed.
By the way, there are some good free process modelling tools out there to help you capture and report on these processes - or do you already have a tool?
Hope this helps.
Guy
Thanks, Guy, for the quick response and helpful hints. The purpose is to improve the processes, so I do need to know everything about each. Why wouldn't "Maintain Customer List" be a process? Is it because it's the same as "identifying customer" and that the Customer List is just the output of that process? The firm also maintains a database of all customers. So the marketing reps can directly update some info and others must be passed to another dept (accounting, for example) to update. So I see "Update Customer Data" as another process (I'm beginning to get the picture!). But since the reps don't directly update data passed to other depts, would that constitute another process "Pass off Customer Data" or is it just a decision in the flowchart branching off to two different steps.
I'm glad you found my comments helpful.
"Maintain customer list" is verb and a noun so could be a process - however "maintain" is one of those catch-all words and what we are after is the reason why the list is being maintained and I guessed it was to identify customers. The actual words are not that important as the process specfication will define what the process actually does, but for clarity it would make sense to make for the process title to be as meaningfull as possible.
I can't really answer your questions about "pass of customer data" without knowing the context of the project...and I would suggest modelling that to define the functional scope anyway.
You said that the objective of this exercise is "to improve the processes" - how will you know that processes have been improved? What will you measure and what target do you need to reach? The reason I am asking is that this will guide what needs to be modelled not just functionally, but in terms of locations, organisation units, data requirements and tools.
Just so I know a bit better where you are coming from, what training/experience have you had in formal business analysis, and are you using any tools to model your requirements?
Guy,
Haven't had any formal training other than to read a few books to get ideas on the business analyst process flow. My approach to identify areas of improvement was to review the activities in each process with the marketing rep to determine if they are necessary. No target has been set by upper management.
I have no tools to model my processes or requirements. You mentioned there are free ones you would recommend. If they aren't difficult to use, suggestions are welcomed.
Many thanks,
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