What is business process documentation? Is it really necessary?

He who seeks to understand the question ‘what is business process documentation’ must understand that it is the current state of a process, in its analysis.

It is because process analysis documentation is the last step to be checked off by the work team during all stages of the analysis process, generating a consensus on what state it is in right now.

In this context, what is business documentation, if not an explicit agreement within the team that analyzes the conclusions that were arrived at in analysis?

It is essentially a baseline for the next steps in the process development and improvement.

Therefore it is crucial to note that the documentation process does not cover anything to escape the current reality of the process, such as projections or estimates.

There are some of the main features of this activity below, as well as a list of some of the documents that can be generated to understand better, what is business process documentation?

See also: Analysis and improvement of business processes: best practices.

What is business process documentation?

Many do not realize the importance of process documentation, seeing this activity as a mere accumulation of papers and giving it a bureaucratic and unproductive aspect.

In fact, you must realize that documentation is part of process improvement in several of its phases, providing a reliable and consensual basis to understand what the necessary improvements are and to make analysis and comparisons of results and performances.

What is business process documentation (As Is)?

The best techniques to be used in documentation processes include the use of process modeling using BPMN notation. To assist the documentation, they should be used with BPM tools, spreadsheets, and other similar technological resources.

See more: Process modeling: 6 PDFs, videos, and 5 4 Slideshare.

Among the activities developed during the documentation, we must highlight the layout of the current process, called AS IS, discrimination of each of the activities that make up the process and the declaration of who the participants are and what their responsibilities are.

Usually, the artifacts generated during the documentation include the document describing the process and activities, and the AS-IS process diagram.

Examples of documents produced

The very model of the current process is already one of the main generated documents. But to get to it, other documents will be very useful:

  • A specification of the purpose of the process.
  • General analysis of the business environment
  • Spreadsheets.
  • Reason to think about improving the process.
  • A description of the activities inherent to the process.
  • List of participants.
  • A specification of the responsibilities of the members.

Documentation of the new process

Another important type of business process documentation is one that occurs after the design of the new process.

Now, the new process model will serve to document characteristics of the following aspects:

  • Details of their activities.
  • Business rules applied in the process.
  • The resultant products.
  • Points of contact with customers and their interactions.

In short, all these considerations about process documentation is a key factor that is present in different stages of process improvement, allowing comparisons so that you can get the best results. Moreover, it contributes to the preservation of knowledge and training sessions.

Agile and intuitive BPM tools, using BPMN notation that can allow more designs, as well as generate reports, alerts and dashboards can provide substantial help in the documentation process as HEFLO do.

So, now that you have all the knowledge of how the documentation process is important in BPMN, learn how to create your own with this video:

Check out: CASE: process mapping example of a company.

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