As a business processes management technique, process mining (PM) has been applied in many domains in the last decade. In healthcare, where most processes are complex, variable, dynamic, and multi-disciplinary in nature, application of this technique is growing, yet challenging. Therefore, this study aims to introduce a goal-driven process evaluation method based on PM for healthcare processes. The proposed method comprises the following steps: defining goals and questions, data extraction, data preprocessing, log and pattern inspection, PM analysis and generating answers to questions, evaluating results, and initiating proposals for process improvements. The proposed method was applied in a case study on the surgery process of a university hospital in Turkey, which revealed for quantitative insights into the process. Bottlenecks and deviations that were crucial for determining measures (e.g., data and performance information) were identified to improve the efficiency of the surgery process. Our initial experience using the proposed method shows that it has potential for initiating process improvements by guiding the use of PM techniques in the healthcare domain.
4Among the Agile methods, Scrum and Kanban are widely used in software development and they are considered the two most effective ones influencing the direct results of projects. Despite the importance of knowing their relative strengths and advantages and integrating them to achieve better results than individual use, none of the secondary studies provide extensive knowledge on the topic. In this paper, we performed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) study to investigate the characteristics of the empirical studies which involve Scrum and Kanban by comparing or integrating them. Our final set includes 38 studies posing primary information on the advantages of each method over another one, the properties including artifacts, roles, and events from Scrum and Kanban in combining them in a hybrid way, and the properties of transitions from one to another such as transition directions (Scrum to Kanban, Kanban to Scrum or Scrum/Kanban to Hybrid), transition years, and transition reasons. The outputs can be interesting for both industry and researchers. For example, nearly all of the transitioning organizations are moving from Scrum to Kanban or to hybrid method. Among the reasons for the transitions, the problems experienced with Scrum are remarkable. In comparison, Kanban stands out clearly in a positive way. Almost all of the teams combining both use flow instead of a sprint.
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