Business processes could focus on running your business or they can refer to processes you need to perform in your volunteer work. They could even refer to your job as the family events coordinator. The point is most sites will have some sort of work processes associated with them.

The business process analysis explores those processes to determine where your site supports one or more business processes. You might recall the events page example on Process Analysis where we started with a page that lists events and with a little investigation determined that the list was the result of a much larger process called events management. Many of the tasks associated with events management could be consolidated into your site.

By exploring your business processes, you gain insight into defining your requirements, developing a solution, and planning your implementation.

Requirements

When defining your requirements, what you want your site do, a business process analysis can reveal how a task on your site is actually part of a larger process. For instance, consider the events page example. If this page is a list of events put on by your clients and you have nothing to do with managing them, then you probably don't want to have a sign up button or a way to track participants. But if you look into your agreement with your client you might see that you need to sort events based on clients. You might need to then organize events by location or date or purpose. This makes your list a little more complicated and thus the features of your site might be a little more complicated.

If your requirement simply stated you wanted to list events on a page, you might end up with a page where you manually type all the event information on one screen (basically the HTML way). With a process analysis, you could consider

• why the event list is needed
• the way you get the information you use on the list
• how much detail needs to be provided
• if the list needs to be sortable or filtered
• if each event needs it own page to allow all event information to be seen.

The answers to these questions would provide the necessary requirement details to ensure you get what you want or need. Drupal is a framework of features that allow you to create what you want so planning ahead is important so that the right features are put into place.

Development

There are different ways to meet requirements. If requirements are not complete or not understood, the development phase could yield undesired results. A business process analysis can reveal features that need to be included in your site during development.

For instance, suppose you are building a gossip column site with several columnists. Your current process might be for your

• columnists to submit their column via a Word document using email
• editors to edit the column for typos and such and pass the Word document to your site content manager
• content manager to copy the content into your site, do a few formatting tasks, and click publish.

Assume you want this business process brought online. Your online process could be for your

• columnist to compose online
• editor to edit online
• content manager to review and approve online.

The development phase would install and integrate the necessary features to meet make this process possible. By thinking beyond the end goal of having columns published on your site, you help to ensure that the development efforts provide what you need.

Implementation

A business process analysis can help you see all the potential audiences and users associated with your site.  It can reveal how processes can be improved. It can also show how processes are performed before site implementation and then after site launch.

As a result of improvements or process differences, you might need training and change management. You might need training sessions to show your team and clients how to perform their tasks online. You might need a strategy that convinces your team and clients that moving your process tasks online is a good thing. Managing change (especially if there is resistance) can be a process unto itself.