When do you need a subprocess

Question

In a discussion with some colleagues and the topic came up around rules of thumb for recognizing when you need to move a part of you workflow to a sub-process?
For example . . . when you clearly to define a new work unit to keep your token moving! When you need to change organizational levels might be a guide as well.
Thoughts?

Answer 1

My guess is that books could be written about this, but I can think of a
few common reasons:
1- The overall process is overly complicated
2- You can reuse the process
3- That part of the process changes very often
4- You talk and think about a part of the process as a single entity in
one ocasion and as a sequence of activities in another.
5- For some sequence of activities, you care when they start, but not when
they finish (asynchronus processing).
6- Division of labor: one person designs/implements process A, another one
process B.
7- etc.
My experience is that when you start talking about the process on early
stages, you leave some details out, draw some boxes, etc. Then you start
filling in the blanks and what at first looked like a single activity, has
now become several.
That moment is usually a good indicator that you might need to extract a
subprocess.
Regards,
Juan
On Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:59:33 -0300, Andrew Davis wrote:
In a discussion with some colleagues and the topic came up around rules
of thumb for recognizing when you need to move a part of you workflow to
a sub-process?
For example . . . when you clearly to define a new work unit to keep
your token moving! When you need to change organizational levels might
be a guide as well.
Thoughts?--
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