Wednesday, 17th March 2021
Two contributions to Continual Evolution: CEFOP, a method for Business Process Continuous Improvement and As-IS/As-IF, a methodological framework for Continual Evolution Methods Engineering
Abstract:
 
Nowadays businesses are living in an ever-changing environment fuelled in large part by technological and societal breakthroughs. This dynamism demands organizations to continually strive to provide faster, better or more innovative products and/or services in order to stay competitive in the market. Companies must be able to constantly and dynamically change their internal structure, products, processes, collaboration patterns, etc. This continual need to change makes company to live in a cycle of continuous improvement, varying from incremental- small steps of continuous improvement to radical- breakthrough and innovation on a large scale. We are using the term continual evolution to refer to the constant need organisations face, from improvement to innovation.
In this CIFRE PhD issued from a collaboration between the LIG-SIGMA team and the startup Net Invaders  based in Aix-en-Provence, we are proposing CEFOP, a method targeting process participants empowerment in planning business process improvement. Participants’ engagement reduces external intervention and accelerates the integration of the changes in the activities. CEFOP combines participative and evidence-based approaches (process mining) to facilitate participation and assure involvement. The method is additionally enriched with collective decision-making strategies inciting to collectively create the vision of change and imagine the most convenient scenario for change transformation. The CEFOP method is constructed using the assembly-based approach by reusing or adapting methodological fragments to be adapted or reused. 
Another result of this PhD is the proposition of the framework As-IS/As-IF aimed to facilitate construction of continual evolution methods for method engineers. This framework is focusing in characterizing the As-IS state of a system and identifying the most convenient evolution scenario, called As-IF system. This contribution proposes a product meta model and a process model, to be adapted to the new method context
Mis à jour le 15 March 2021