In Soft Systems Methodology, once we've captured the business perspective, our next job is to create a business activity model, or BAM. This is a vizualisation of the essential activities required to fulfil the perspective.

It's not a model of what the organization does, it's what it should be doing according to our stakeholder, whose perspective we've captured. And it's not how those things will be done; that's what process models are all about.

The BAM shows the conceptual activities that the stakeholder would need to have performed for the organization to be the organization they visualized in the perspective. And those essential activities will be connected together with a set of logical dependencies.

What's that? Well, a logical dependency answers the question, 'What needs to have happened for this thing to be able to happen?'

Consider cancelling an order, what needs to have happened for me to be able to cancel an order? Well, clearly, I need to have placed the order in the first place. So that is our logical dependency, that's going to be visualised as an arrow between the activity, place order, and cancel order.

But arrows are dangerous things, very often imply sequence. There is no sequence here, there is no sense that you will first place and then cancel an order, nor is there a view of iterations; we don't know how many times you would place orders before eventually cancelling an order.

It is merely a question of dependency, cancelling an order will not be possible if placing an order hasn't occurred originally.

Now, we're just going to be careful as we read this diagram so we understand what the arrows are telling us.

This conceptual model, this business activity model, is going to be hugely valuable in the creation of a target operating model because it's going to show the things that need to be facilitated in that model.

It's not going to show us who does what, how it's done, where it happens, but it will illustrate what needs to occur, and it will also, therefore, be valuable in gap analysis. We can look at what current capability we have compared to the capability that we need.

There's a process to creating the business activity model, and Peter Checkland gives us a stepwise approach, beginning with what he calls the doing activities, these come straight from the perspectives transformation.

Remember, transformation is that creation, value creation, if you like, turning input into output, transforming input to output.

There will be essential activities described in that transformation, these go straight into the BAM and form its very heart. Then these need to be enabled, our second breed of activity, the enabling activities.

I once saw these described as acquire and deploy resources, that's exactly what they do. To be able to perform the transformation, and doing activities, we will need resources, they need to be acquired, they need to be deployed somehow, that's our second, if you like, layer of activities.

Now, before we acquire and deploy those resources, of course, we will need to plan their acquisition and their deployment, and plan the doing itself.

And planning here is going to include identifying critical success factors and deciding what to measure our KPIs in setting those targets.

Planning requires information. If you're familiar with the Deming cycle, PDCA: plan, do, check, act, you will already know that the plan is only ever as good as the information that it's fed.

So, where does that information come from? Well, some of it will be external and some internal.

The internal information that planning requires is to do with performance. How do we get that?

Well, this gives us our fourth type of business activity, the so-called monitoring activities. The idea of a monitoring activity is that it will look at action taking place elsewhere, activity within doing activities, maybe also within enabling activities, and asses their performance.

So it's using those KPIs that we mentioned previously, and gather that information. Point being, of course, to be able to change PDCA: check, act.

So, we have the final group of activities, which is control activities. Wherever there is a monitoring activity, we will need the controlling activity to take that information and fire it off, as it were, to the necessary bit of planning that will make alterations.

That's our five sets of activities, they'll all be joined together with our arrows, our logical dependencies, where we have control.

Well, those might be firing off in any number of different directions, and if we join our arrows up we'll end up with circular dependencies, and that's going to make your head explode.

So, control activities get the lightning bolt, the zig zag dependency, it's an arrow that doesn't go anywhere, but we understand that it's going to be picked up, the information will be picked up wherever it's needed.

So the business activity model is complete, and it's given us an idea of how the transformation in our stakeholder's perspective would actually play out if the organisation were designed around that perspective.

But that, of course, is just one stakeholder's perspective, and we need to think about others, and this is going to lead us then to trying to find a consensus view. We'll look at the consensus BAM a little bit later on.

Using BAMs

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