Looking for Essential Business Entities

 We find the Tutor and Pupil at the water-cooler and eavesdrop on their conversation. The Pupil and a group of colleagues have been trying out the Riva method for constructing a process architecture and have met with a few challenges, in particular in getting the Essential Business Entities out of workshop attendees.

Pupil: We’ve been applying the method to the government department we’re working with. I can’t say it was easy, in fact we had a few tricky moments I’d like to take up with you.

Tutor: Sure – but I never said it was easy!

Pupil: Well, we started by writing the subject area on the board in the format you suggested last time we met: ‘The business of subsidy claim management in the Ministry of Administrative Affairs (MAA)’.

Tutor: Sounds like a good start. Did they suggest that?

Pupil: Pretty much. They wanted to include all the contributions to the management of subsidy claims across the whole of MAA. In fact, to start with they thought about all claims in just one department of the MAA, but after some discussion – which I think they actually found really useful – they realised that it was subsidy claims that were the troublesome area in particular and that if they were going to avoid taking a narrow, stove-pipe view they needed to open it up to the entire Ministry. I was a bit worried by the amount of time they spent on discussing this, but I realise now that it was time well spent, even if all we seemed to get out of it was twelve words.

Tutor: Good start.

Pupil: So we then told them about the idea of an essential business entity . . .

Tutor: How did you describe an EBE?

Pupil: ‘A thing that is the essence of the business’, ‘some thing that characterises the business, that you can’t get away from if you’re in that business’ and so on . . .

Tutor: And how did they take to that?

Pupil: Well, slowly, as you said they would. There was a bit of a silence, so I suggested ‘a Subsidy’ to get the ball rolling. Then someone suggested ‘a Subsidy Claim’ . . . that was good and so we had two on the flipchart. But then someone suggested ‘management’.

Tutor: Right, there will always be a first suggestion that is not the sort of entity you want and in your workshop it came out pretty early. What happened?

Pupil: Well, I remembered the method and said that the one rule was that we had to be able to put the word ‘a’ or ‘an’ in front of it, as a check that it was a thing and moreover the sort of thing that can be separated from another one. And ‘a Management’ doesn’t work. So I said I wouldn’t let them have that and then the trouble started – ‘Since we’re in the business of managing subsidy claims it’s a bit odd that an important topic like management isn’t on the list’. How should I have handled that?

Tutor: Firstly, that’s a perfectly normal thing to happen. It can take a while for people to see the sort of thing you are looking for and it sometimes needs some pushing to get them to come up with those sorts of thing and no others. A useful test for the sort of entity we are looking for is ‘can I list the examples of this entity that we have at the moment?’ The answer is clearly ‘yes’ for something like ‘employee’, or ‘job application’, or ‘complaint’. The answer is clearly ‘no’ for things like ‘management’, ‘safety’, and ‘quality’. Secondly, you need to be very strict with the people in the room about letting them have only the things that meet the rules. It’s your workshop and you know what is needed to get a result. The workshop isn’t there for them to have all their thoughts dutifully recorded: you might need to remind them occasionally that the exercise has a very specific purpose (to get to the process architecture for the business concerned) and that the steps are carefully designed to achieve that purpose. Just because something is left off the board (or bracketed) doesn’t mean we don’t do it – simply that it’s not useful for this exercise. Being strict is hard if the group you’re working with is The People At The Top as I suggested last time we met. But you have to do it or they will derail your workshop! So, given that you aren’t going to let them have ‘management’ per se, you need to get behind the topic to find the entities – what sort of things do they manage? My guess would be ‘an Application for a Subsidy’, ‘a Change to a Subsidy’, . . . am I getting close?

Pupil: Yes, that’s in fact the sort of thing we managed to get out.

Tutor: You see, when you get what you think is the list of EBEs that ‘characterise the business concerned’, the test is to ask ‘if we concerned ourselves with all these things, would we be doing that business?’ Of course, if they were thinking about management in the sense of ‘managing the work’, then you can rightly say ‘the MAA is not in the business of managing work – it’s in the business of managing subsidies’. Now we both know that ‘managing the work’ in the sense of resource scheduling and allocation will be covered by the case management process later on, so we’ll cover that angle as well in fact, but at this stage in the method we concentrate single-mindedly on the entities that characterise the business we are in. A similar problem you might get is when people suggest things like ‘safety’ or ‘profit’ or ‘transparency’ . . .

Pupil: . . . exactly – we had ‘transparency’ – they were very keen that the way they dealt with things was transparent and it was with a little reluctance that ‘a Transparency’ didn’t go on the flipchart! . . .

Tutor: . . . right – transparent is how we want our processes to be, but it’s not what we are in business for. So you were right to steer them away from that one. Similarly, if you do get something like ‘security’, push them to find the EBEs behind it – how about ‘security risk’, ‘security measure’, and security breach’? These all satisfy the rules. Of course, many processes will have a security aspect or security content, but that’s a fact about those processes and doesn’t mean that ‘security’ generates processes itself unless we can find entities like ‘security measure’. People will also suggest things like ‘cash’, ‘quality’, ‘recruitment’ – none of these are EBEs – they don’t satisfy the ‘a’/'an’ test. Someone once called me to say that he was surprised that ‘profit’ wasn’t an automatic EBE for every business. I had to point out that, firstly, it’s not an entity in the sense that I want it (it fails the ‘can I list them?’ test), and secondly not every organisation is in business to make a profit – try your local police force for instance, or scout troop. Moreover, you and I could be in the same business – dealing with the same things – yet I could want to make a profit and you could be in a not-for-profit organisation. Schools are an obvious example. Profit is a goal of the organisation, not something that characterises its business.

Pupil: Thanks! I’m comforted to hear that although we had to push them we pushed them in the right way! In the end we actually ended up with 35 items . . . which I think surprised them.

Tutor: You know, there’s really no rule about how many you should have. I once worked with a local authority – they do so many things we ended up with about 250! At the other end of the spectrum I’ve worked with a small group with a very narrow remit and got just ten. Whatever number you get is OK! Anyway – good start – next time we meet I’ll give you some more guidance on this.

Best wishes, Martyn Ould