Progress Determination of a BPM Tool with Ad-Hoc Changes: An Empirical Study

Abstract

One aspect of monitoring business processes in real-time is to determine their current progress. For any real-time progress determination it is of utmost importance to accurately predict the remaining share still to be executed in relation to the total process. At run-time, however, this constitutes a particular challenge, as unexpected ad-hoc changes of the ongoing business processes may occur at any time. To properly consider such changes in the context of progress determination, different progress variants may be suitable. In this paper, an empirical study with 194 participants is presented that investigates user acceptance of different progress variants in various scenarios. The study aims to identify which progress variant, each visualised by a progress bar, is accepted best by users in case of dynamic process changes, which usually effect the current progress of the respective progress instance. The results of this study allow for an implementation of the most suitable variant in business process monitoring systems. In addition, the study provides deeper insights into the general acceptance of different progress measurements. As a key observation for most scenarios, the majority of the participants give similar answers, e.g., progress jumps within a progress bar are rejected by most participants. Consequently, it can be assumed that a general understanding of progress exists. This underlines the importance of comprehending the users' intuitive understanding of progress to implement the latter in the most suitable fashion.