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Chapter 11: A Coordination Theory Approach to Process Description and Redesign
Kevin Crowston, Charles S. Osborn
11.1 Introduction
chapter 2 in this volume).We identified several potentially conflicting requirements that led to our developing a new technique, rather than applying one of many existing techniques.First, and most important, we wanted a technique that is generative, that is, capable of not only documenting what people do now but also suggesting feasible alternatives. We are not aware of any other technique that was designed to meet this requirement.Second, it was important that documenting a process not become an end in itself. While understanding the current process is important, documentation is not the only aspect of organizational change that managers must consider, and probably not even the most critical one. Therefore, as a general principle, we add complexity to a description only if it helps answer some question important for a redesign.Third, we want the technique to be valid. By this we mean that the suggestions of the technique must make sense to the individuals involved in the work.
To achieve these goals, we were willing to sacrifice a degree of reliability in that two analysts studying the same process will develop exactly the same description. So we applied a looser but perhaps more practical criterion: one analyst studying a process in some context should derive descriptions that can be readily understood and debated by another. The analysts then should be able to combine their individual descriptions into a jointly acceptable representation that incorporates the characteristics identified by each. Such a representation might serve as the foundation of an explicit consensus between different analysts that recognizes a shared interpretation of the configuration and priorities of process details.
Our resulting technique draws on three conceptual tools. First, as with most process mapping techniques, we decompose processes into sequences of activities. Second, drawing on coordination theory (Malone 1994), we explicitly search for and represent dependencies within the process and coordination mechanisms used to manage those dependencies. Coordination theory has been used as the basis for a number of analyses (e.g., Crowston 1997), but until now, there has been no description of how to apply the techniques. Finally, we analyze the process and the activities in the process as specializations of more generic processes and activities, thus linking activities together into an organized inheritance hierarchy.In the next section we review the theoretical bases for our technique, with particular attention to dependencies and coordination theory. In section 11.3 we walk through the stages in our proposed technique and present an extended example. Our overall approach draws heavily on Checkland's Soft Systems Methodology (1981, 1989, 1990). In section 11.4 we discuss how the representations developed can be used to suggest alternative processes, satisfying our first requirement of generativity. We conclude by presenting an evaluation of our technique and its implications for action.
