Introduction

So, you have documented your business processes in detail using Blueworks Live. But your processes do not remain static you need a mechanism to be sure that they are fit for purpose. Implementing a regular review cycle is the ideal way to keep your business processes fresh and up to date. In this post I will discuss some ideas for implementing a regular review cycle.

Information Model

To implement a review cycle, we need to ensure that some information is held within our Process Blueprint.

First, we need to know who the business owner for the process is. Blueworks Live provides a field for this. Ideally, we would use a role rather than a person’s name here.

Next, we need to know when the review should occur. Adding a field to the Blueworks Live custom properties a good way to hold this information. This field could hold an exact date for the Process to be reviewed. We have found that this is not usually necessary, holding the month for the review is enough. We use an enumerated field to hold the review month. See Defining Enumeration Values in IBM Blueworks Live for details on how to set up an enumerated field for a custom property.

Figure 1: Enumerated field showing the review month for a Process Blueprint

Please note that we are adding this information at the level of the whole Process Blueprint. The details panel for the Blueprint is opened by double clicking on the canvas (background) of the Discovery Map or Blueprint page.

This mechanism is not limited to Process Blueprints. We can use it for other assets such as Policies and Decision Models.

Reviewing Processes

The “Export Space” button will generate a spreadsheet that includes a sheet that holds the “Review Month” field with details of the assets and the month for them to be reviewed. The review month field can be sorted/filtered to show the assets that need to be reviewed.

Once we have a list of processes (and other assets) that need to be reviewed we can schedule the meetings or actions required.

A simple workflow could be created using a Blueworks Live Process App. This would send emails with links to the relevant assets and provide conformation that people have reviewed those assets.

Once we have reviewed the processes and signed off any changes, we can update Blueworks Live, create a new snapshot and publish the updated version.

Alternative Approach - Use Published Date or Last Modified Date 

An alternative method to determine which Blueprints should be reviewed is to use their "age".  

The following is a simple method to sort Blueprints by age:

1.Create a Space export for the top level space containing Blueprints of interest.

2.Go to the Items tab in the exported spreadsheet. Add a new column after the Published Date Column (or the Last Updated column), call it “Age in Days”, make the fields in this column Number fields with no decimal places.

3.Use the following Formula for the cells this column, changing the cell coordinates as required.

=TODAY()-(DATEVALUE(LEFT(H1,FIND("at",H1)-1)))

4.You can now sort on this column to find the oldest Blueprints. The owners can then be prompted to review the artefacts.

Summary

Reviewing your business processes on a regular basis can help to keep them up to date; it can also help you to comply with regulatory requirements. It is simple to set up a review mechanism using the features of IBM Blueworks Live.