Business Processes
How work actually flows, including the handoffs nobody documented.
4 to work through
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intermediate Multiple choice
A food-delivery platform handles 220,000 orders a day. About 1.8% of orders raise a refund dispute. Automated rules settle most of them but 22% reach a human agent who spends roughly 9 minutes per case. A fully loaded agent costs about £38,000 a year and delivers about 1,500 productive hours. Roughly what does the manual tail cost per year?
3 min answer -
intermediate
A manual onboarding process handles about 400 cases a month. Automation covers the standard path, and after six months roughly 20% of cases still go to a person because each has some exception. The team proposes automating the remaining exceptions. How should this be sequenced?
2 min answer -
intermediate
A process takes eleven days end to end and involves four hours of actual work. What does that tell you and where do you look?
2 min answer -
advanced Multiple choice
A travel platform's booking process spans six systems and takes days to change. Where should the process logic live, and what is the trade-off?
2 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Business Processes
The sequences of activity that exercise capabilities — where handoffs, exceptions and manual steps reveal what the architecture must support.
conceptException Tail
The minority of cases an automated process cannot handle, whose automation cost per case rises steeply, so the economically correct end state is usua…
conceptProcess Model
A representation of how work actually flows through an organisation, distinguished from a capability by describing sequence, actors and handoffs.
Neighbouring topics
Business Architecture
General material on the business side of architecture.
Business Capabilities
What a business does, stated stably and independent of implementation.
Capability Mapping
Overlaying systems onto capabilities to expose duplication and gaps.
Value Streams
End-to-end delivery of an outcome, and where the waiting happens.
Domain Boundaries
Where the language of the business changes, and services should too.
Stakeholder Analysis
Who is affected, what they need, and who can block you late.
Product Thinking
Treating platforms and services as products with users and a lifecycle.
Business KPIs
The numbers a design is ultimately judged against.
Regulatory Constraints
Non-negotiable requirements that remove design options entirely.
Organisational Constraints
Team structure, skills and budget cycles as architectural inputs.
Time to Market
The constraint that dominates most products, and how to trade against it.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation versus table stakes, priced over five years.
Business Cases
Expressing an architecture proposal in the currency that gets funded.
Operating Models
How delivery, platform and governance functions fit together.
Team Topologies
Stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem teams.
Platform as a Product
Adoption earned rather than mandated, with an owner and a roadmap.
Outcome Measurement
Knowing whether the thing you built achieved what it promised.
Portfolio Prioritisation
Choosing between investments with incomparable benefits.
Business Continuity
What the business does while the system is unavailable.