Participatory Design and Cyclic Improvement of Business Processes with Workflow Management Systems

Abstract

We have a lot of results about participatory design and also an extensive discussion about how to conduct a continuous improvement of business processes with the help of workflow management systems. However, the synthesis of both perspectives is lacking. In the following we make some suggestions on how to overcome this gap. The necessity of participation in the course of business process improvement is widely acknowledged, but with different intentions. The management has recognized that they need to explore the knowledge and experience of their staff. Employees and their representatives try to prevent negative consequences of rationalization and expect their working conditions to be improved. Caused by these diverging interests we have a variety of modes and ways of how participation is practiced. Therefore we try to describe a framework explaining which mode of participation is sensible or crucial for which phase in the course of continuous business process improvement. Our method is to contrast the literature on Participatory Design (CACM 93) with the publications on business process reengineering (e.g. Hammer et al. 94), workflow management (e.g. Swenson et. al. 95) and continuous improvement with evolutionary life cycles (James 89). Furthermore we have made three case studies investigating how companies organize projects to introduce workflow management systems and how they involve their employees. During the case studies we took the role of consultants who had to summarize the different modes and experience and to support the information transfer. 2 A Framework From the perspective of evolutionary life cycles we can construct a workflow life cycle which starts with the gathering of data. In the next step the data is used to model, analyze and improve the business process. Then a workflow management system is selected and configured to support the improved version of the business process. Afterwards the system is used and experience is made which helps to investigate the weak points. With this investigation the cyclic process of continuous improvement starts again. Similarly the participatory design (and