Talk:Procedure

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In the nodal model the word "procedure" refers to the organisational context (business procedure or procedure), not to CPU procedures.

A business procedure is a set of linked activities that create value by transforming an input into a more valuable output. Both input and output can be artefacts and/or information and the transformation can be performed by humans, machines, or both.

There are three types of business procedures:

• Management procedures - the procedures that govern the operation. Typical management procedures include "Corporate Governance" and "Strategic Management".
• Operational procedures - these procedures create the primary value stream, they are part of the core business. Typical operational procedures are Purchasing, Manufacturing, Marketing, and Sales.
• Supporting procedures - these support the core procedures. Examples include Accounting, Recruitment, IT-support.

A business procedure can be decomposed into several sub-procedures, which have their own attributes, but also contribute to achieving the goal of the super-procedure. The analysis of business procedures typically includes the mapping of procedures and sub-procedures down to activity level.

Activities are parts of the business procedure that do not include any decision making and thus are not worth decomposing (although decomposition would be possible), such as "Answer the phone", "produce an invoice".

A business procedure is usually the result of a business procedure design or business procedure reengineering activity. Business procedure modeling is used to capture, document and reengineer business procedures. To visualize a business procedure, one of the graphical notations can be used such as Business procedure Modeling Notation.

Defining procedures

A procedure definition must specify sequences of actions, acts or operations which have to be executed in the same manner in order to obtain always the same result in the same circumstances (for example, emergency procedures). Less precisely speaking, this word can indicate a sequence of activities, tasks, steps, decisions, calculations and procedures, that when undertaken in the sequence laid down produces the described result, product or outcome. A procedure usually induces a change.

Business procedure Mapping refers to activities involved in defining exactly what a business entity does, who is responsible, to what standard a procedure should be completed and how the success of a business procedure can be determined. Once this is done, there can be no uncertainty as to the requirements of every internal business procedure.

ISO 9001 requires a business entity to follow a procedure approach when managing its business, and to this end creating business procedure maps will assist. The entity can then work towards ensuring its procedures are effective (the right procedure is followed the first time), and efficient (continually improved to ensure procedures use the least amount of resources).

Identification

In an organisation, all roles and resources have unique identification so that procedures can be described in terms of these role and resources and what sequences they must occur in. The procedures themselves also have unique identification so that small procedures can be components of larger procedures.

In the nodal model all procedures, resources and roles are nodes whose globally unique identification is handled by Identity, one of the fundamental nodal organisations. The procedures are defined in terms of roles, but at runtime the role-instance (actor) being referred to is filled by either a human or a function, depending on the scale of operation and the nature of the procedure. The procedures order of execution is defined by the geometric structure of the nodes rather than by language syntax, and the interpreter of this structure is the nodal reduction algorithm.

Procedures and Workshops

Workshop provide a sequence and context to procedures, using examples, games or explanations to introduce them. In addition to the procedure steps, normally within the learning units, they introduce sections like:

Objectives

The goal of a learning unit.

Examples

Sometimes examples can clarify the objective.

Bonus Learning

Optional extra lessons or exercises that may follow a procedure to deepen the learning achieved.

See also

• YAWL - Yet Another Workflow Language
• BPEL - Business procedure Execution Language
• Workflow patterns
• Create Procedure We need to harmonise the content of Procedure with this, ultimately it should be a form.
• Procedure/Methodology Another slightly different article about the same thing, needs to be merged with article above and turned into a form
• Example procedure from WikiHow
  • Example form for creating a new procedure on WikiHow