Eliciting and Modeling Business Process Stories

Abstract

Most business process modeling tools used today encourage the rendition of lean, prescribed and clearly coordinated activities, which often clash with far more intricate business realities. This paper evaluates an alternative approach that adopts concepts from storytelling and sense-making theories to elicit process stories. The viability of this approach is tested in a case study involving sixteen individuals from the same organization who tell their personal views about a business process, thus gathering a total of twenty process stories. The obtained results suggest that process stories may increase the meaningfulness, contextualization and overall richness of process models.

Using Process Stories to Foster Process Flexibility: The Experts’ Viewpoint

“…A few research studies have explored process stories as a method to analyse business processes, assessing the capacity of process stories to examine business scenarios and capture process knowledge (Antunes et al, 2020;Haggège & Vernay, 2019). Some works have specifically used process stories as an instrument to analyse process flexibility and contextualisation, focusing on the method's strengths to highlight variant scenarios lived by different people participating in the process (Antunes et al, 2019;Simões et al, 2018). To some extent, these studies indicate that process stories are promising to push the realization of process flexibility.…”

“…Positioning the interview results with recent studies, we can further suggest that process stories help bringing personal experiences with the process. They narrate a combination of structured and unstructured events, providing context to the workflows (Antunes et al, 2020;Simões et al, 2018). They can narrate complex situations using simple scenarios and narratives.…”

“…Process stories rely on storytelling theory to communicate a variety of viewpoints over a business process (Antunes, Pino, Tate, & Barros, 2020;Haggège & Vernay, 2019;Hayes, Lee, & Dourish, 2011). Process stories have been used to analyse organizational business processes and the related views over these processes (Antunes et al, 2020;Leite, Antunes, Guimarães, & Pino, 2019;Simões, Antunes, & Carriço, 2018). We suggest that the capacity of conveying diverse viewpoints about a process can help BPM experts to understand and deal with the various forces involved in the dynamics of friction.…”

Successful Mobile Application Development: Towards a Taxonomy of Domain-Specific Process Models and Methodologies

“…For example, process models should help the members of an organization to automate and integrate business processes within the organization. In addition, they should help workers to analyze and rearrange their activities [22,23,24]. When we look at process models in the software development domain, they "represent a networked sequence of activities, objects, transformations, and events that embody strategies for accomplishing software" [25; p. 4].…”

“…Another limitation is the inflexibility of classical process models in a company environment [24,57]. Unexpected events or shifting circumstances can lead to a change in the originally planned process [58].…”