dolution

Consider the university admission process described in Exercise 1.1 (p. 4) and the corresponding issues documented in Exercise 6.4 (p. 201).

a) Apply the redesign heuristics in order to address the issues documented in Exercise 6.4 (p. 201).
b) Capture the resulting to-be model in BPMN.
c) Explain the impact of the changes you propose in terms of the performance dimensions of the Devil’s Quadrangle.
Exercise 1.1 (p. 4)

Consider the following process for the admission of graduate students at a university.

Solution to 1.1

1. Admissions officer, applicant, academic recognition agency and academic committee.
The admissions office as an organizational unit can also be recognized as a separate actor.

2. The applicant.

3. One can argue that the value that the process provides to the applicant is the assessment of the application and the subsequent decision to accept or reject. In this case, the process delivers value both if the applicant is accepted or rejected, provided that the application is processed in due order. Another viewpoint would be to say that the process only gives value to the applicant only if the applicant is accepted, and not if the applicant is rejected. Arguments can be put forward in favor of either of these two viewpoints.

4. Applicant rejected due to incomplete documents; Applicant rejected due to English language test results; Applicant rejected due to assessment of academic recognition agency; Applicant rejected due to academic committee decision;

Applicant accepted. A more in-depth analysis could reveal other possible outcomes such as “Application withdrawn by applicant” or “Applicant conditionally accepted subject to providing additional documents”. However, there are not enough elements in the description of the process to determine if these latter outcomes are possible.

Exercise 6.2 (p. 195)

Consider the university admission process described in Exercise 1.1 (p. 4).

One of the issues faced by the university is that students have to wait too long to know the outcome of the application (especially for successful outcomes). It often happens that by the time a student is admitted, the student has decided to go to another university instead (students send multiple applications in parallel to many
universities).

Analyze the causes of this issue using a cause–effect diagram.

Solution to 6.2

The cause–effect diagram corresponding to this exercise should include at least the name of the issue
(e.g. “Student waiting time too long”) and the following factors:

• Process stalls due to agency check. This is a “Method” issue, since the issue stems from the fact that the process essentially stalls until a response is received from the agency. One could argue that to some extent this is a “Milieu” issue. But while the slowness of the agency check is a “Milieu” issue, the fact that the process stalls until a response is received from the agency is a “Method” issue.

• Agency check takes too long. This is a “Milieu” issue since the agency is a separate entity that imposes its own limitations.

• Academic committee assessment takes too long. This is a “Method” issue since the process imposes that the academic committee only assesses applications at certain times (when it meets), rather than when applications are ready to be evaluated.

• Physical documents take too long to be received. This is a “Milieu” issue for two reasons. First, the physical documents are needed for the purpose of the agency check and the delays in the arrival of physical documents are caused by the applicants themselves and postal service delays.

• Admission office delays the notification after academic assessment. This seems to be a “Method” issue, but the description of the process does not give us sufficient information to state this conclusively. Here, a process analyst would need to gather more information in order to understand this issue in further detail.

Solution to 6.4

In the following issue register, we only analyze the issue described in this chapter, namely that the admission process takes too long. In practice, the issue register would include multiple issues.

Issue 1: Students reject offer due to long waiting times

Priority: 1

Description: The time between online submission of an application to notification of acceptance takes too long, resulting in some students rejecting their admission offer

Assumptions: Circa 20 students per admission round reject their offer because of the delays. Assessment of each application costs € 100 per student to the university in time spent by admissions office and academic committee, plus an additional € 50 for the agency check. University spends € 100 in marketing for each application it attracts

Qualitative impact: Students who would contribute to the institution in a positive way are lost. Delays in the admission process affect the image of the university vis-a-vis of future students, and generate additional effort to handle enquiries from students while they wait for the admission decisions

Quantitative impact: 20 ×€ 250 = € 5000 per admission round

In the above issue analysis, the effort required to deal with enquiries during the pre-admission period is listed in the qualitative impact field. If it was possible (with a reasonable amount of effort) to estimate how many such enquiries arrive and how much time they consume, it would be possible to turn this qualitative impact into a
quantitative one.