BCS Certificate in Modelling Business Processes

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Distinguish between business systems and IT systems
• Define process and describe their benefits to organisations
• Demonstrate understanding of the purpose and benefits of business process modelling
• Differentiate between process mapping and process modelling
• Highlight the role played by IT in businesses
• State the approaches to business process modelling
• Identify the three levels of the business process hierarchy
  • Enterprise level
  • Event-response level
  • Actor-task level
• Specify functional view of an enterprise
• Explain importance of the process view versus the functional view of an organisation
• Describe the importance and advantages of the process view
• Interpret the construction of an organisational model of business process
• Elaborate on the ‘Map before model’ paradigm
• Define SIPOC model and describe SIPOC view of the enterprise
• State Harmon model of the organisation and describe how it expands on SIPOC
• Define value proposition
• Explain how the processes on the organisational model support the delivery of value proposition
• Define Porter’s value chain and describe the primary and secondary activities in the model
• Illustrate value chain with examples from manufacturing and services sectors
• Interpret the construction of a business process model
• Explain why using a standard notation set is important
• Define BPMN and specify its usage as a popular notation for business processes
• Define UML and explain its usage as a notation for business processes and systems
• Distinguish between modelling business process terms
• Explain how UML activity diagrams are used for modelling business processes
• Demonstrate by drawing a UML activity diagram along with all its components
• Describe how the modelling business process terms relate to each other
• State the OPOPOT principle and Demonstrate how its shown in a process model
• Define actor, identify actors in different contexts
• Define business rule and explain their significance to business processes
• Identify the different types of business events
• Explain the purpose of process performance measures
• Distinguish between internal performance measures and customers’ expectations of performance
• Define a task and construct a task description
• Explain the concept of timeline as applicable to tasks
• Explain the use of joins, forks and merges as used in UML notation for tasks
• Demonstrate how to document the steps and business rules within a task
• Apply approaches to improving business processes
• Describe how to perform a task analysis, with an example
• Explain the steps in documenting business rules
• Discuss how to challenge business rules and assumptions when improving business processes
• Define use case diagram/model and explain the structure of a use case description
• Differentiate between main flows, alternate flows, exceptions and errors in use case description
• Explain the conditional and unconditional flows with examples (if else, while do, for loops)
• Identify areas of a business process that contributes to unsatisfactory performance
• Illustrate some areas with problems in process flows
• List the approaches to potentially improve the process flows
• Describe the use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in process improvements
• List the typical non value added (NVA) activities in organisations
• Define scenario analysis and explain its contribution in process modelling
• Explain the need to test processes through use of business scenario analysis
• Describe how critical analysis is useful in challenging assumptions
• Highlight the key differences between business process improvement v. re-design
• Explain the contexts for using business process improvement (BPI)
• Explain the contexts for using business process re-design (BPR) or re-engineering
• State how understanding of as-is processes helps with the current /baseline state definition
• Describe how understanding of to-be processes helps with the future /target state definition
• Define gap analysis and elaborate on how to conduct gap analysis from as-is and to-be processes
• Prepare a gap analysis to identify the functional requirements that could be supported by IT solution
• Describe the considerations of introducing a new process design
• Discuss the need for a holistic approach to planning for an organisational change
• Illustrate the case for using POPIT framework to implement business change
• Discuss the use of implementation strategies for implementing business change