Narrative
The participant initiates the process by contacting a business coach in the business area to which their project belongs and expressing their interest in participating in a training course. This contact can occur via telephone, email or a face-to-face meeting. The business coach then checks whether the selected course is relevant to the project(s) the participant is involved in and whether there is a more appropriate/relevant course. To do this, the business coach accesses the central registry of projects of CBA and uses their own judgment to assess the relevance. They may also contact the participant's manager to confirm. To participate in a course, the participant must be working on a project.
If there is a relevant course that the participant has not already completed, the business coach then collects all the participant's details which they send on to the training coordinator. The training coordinator checks they have received all the required information and if they have not, they send an email request back to the business coach who then collects it off the participant. Then, the missing information is emailed to the training coordinator who puts the participant's details on the course attendance sheet (an Excel file).
The training coordinator then sends an invite email to the participant who can respond to their invitation to participate in the course via the reject and accept buttons in the email. After that, the training coordinator writes in their diary to remind them to check after three days whether the participant has responded to their course offer. If the participant has not responded after three days, the training coordinator emails the business coach who contacts the participant (often via phone but sometimes email) to remind them to respond to the invite email. If the participant accepts, an event is automatically generated in the participant's Outlook diary and the participant is enrolled in the course. The training coordinator sends a confirmation email to the business coach saying that the participant is enrolled thus completing the enrollment process. If the participant is no longer available for training, they reject the offer and the process ends.

Table of Entities and Activities Entities | Para | Activities | Participant | 1 | 1. Show interest in training courses to Coach | Business Coach | 1 | 2. Check participant’s involvement in projects | Business Coach | 1 | 3a. If the Participant is working on projects, match the Participant to relevant courses by subjective judgment;3b. If the Participant is not with any project, disallow the application | Business Coach | 2 | 4a. Collect required details from Participant;4b. Fill in the information sheet | Business Coach | 2 | 5. Send the information sheet of Participant to Training Coordinator | Training Coordinator | 2 | 6a. If all information needed have been provided, then fill in the course attendance sheet;6b. If certain information is missing, send request back to Business Coach to collect | Business Coach | 2 | 7a. Collect missing information from Participant;7b. Send missing information to Training Coordinator | Training Coordinator | 3 | 8a. Send an invite email to Participant8b. Record in diary | Participant | 3 | 9a. Accept/Reject the course arrangement; | Training Coordinator | 3 | 10a. If Participant accepts the invitation, enroll the Participant and send a confirmation email to Business Coach;10b. If Participant rejects the invitation, do nothing;10c. If Participant does not respond to the invitation, emails Business Coach | Business Coach | 3 | 11. Remind Participant to respond to invitation |

Current Situation Models:

Current DFD:

*Only occurs if the business coach does not send all the required participant details to the training coordinator initially.
**Only occurs if the participant has not responded to the invite email after 3 days.

Current ERD:

NB. Training coordinator is not included as there is only one.

Current BPMN:

Assumptions: * Everyone responds the second time. * Participants will respond after receiving a reminder. Thus, it is not modelled. * Response must be through clicking the accept or reject button in the invitation email. * Project managers are not contacted as part of the process of the business coach determining participant eligibility because it does not occur often * Start event is the participant deciding they want to participate in a training course * Liaising with participant includes checking/confirming the participant's eligibility to do the course * The process of recommending participants to a course in order to fill a course is outside the scope of the model

Analysis of the current situation and recommendations

Under the current system, the training coordinator has to check whether the business coach has provided all the necessary participant details. If they have not, they have to request them from the business coach who then has to contact the participant and relay the missing details back to the training coordinator. This process may cause irritation and is inefficient for all involved. To avoid this, we propose the use of an online form which the participant fills out and is not able to submit until all the required details are completed thus reducing the training coordinator's and business coach's workloads. While an online form is a convenient solution, it is important to consider the possible cost of developing such a function, as well as the time required to implement it. In the end, the process that is being discussed is a minor part of the organisation, that upper management might not readily be willing to invest large amounts of funds into.

Additionally, the business coach has to use human judgement to determine the participant's eligibility to participate in a course. In large business areas, there can be multiple business coaches. This may result inconsistent acceptances/rejections of applications. For example, two potential participants are working on the same project and thus are working in the same business area. However, they contact different business coaches and one is accepted while the other is declined. This could lead to tension between workers. One solution to this is to create a database which uses the project ID from the centralised project database and displays which courses are relevant to which projects. By determining eligibility in this way, the business coach's role would be lessened and the potential for prejudices and favouritism of individuals could almost be eliminated.

Upon further analysis of the current process of enrolment, it is evident that the role of the business coach is essentially that of an intermediary. While it is true that they assess an applicant’s eligibility for a particular course and recommend alternative/complementary courses, we suggest that automation could play a bigger role. For instance, depending upon the number of projects within the organisation, one could possibly only have one business coach. This business coach would work in a back office role, understanding the organisation’s projects and deciding which of the training program’s courses and suitable for any particular project. As mentioned previously, this will result in greater uniformity and equality of opportunity across the organisation. Under this system, the business coach’s role is essentially modified to that of data entry, as opposed to liaising with participants.

In the current process, the business coach may in some cases need to contact the participant’s project manager in order to verify their details. As internal control within an organisation is essential, this element of the process can not be removed altogether. In fact, in the proposed process, the business coach would be required to authenticate all applications before they can be processed by the training coordinator. Furthermore, the task of validating an employee’s details can be undertaken using the CBA main database, instead of contacting a participant’s project manager directly. As a result, we aim reduce throughput time in the authentication part of the process. While this idea may require more work on the part of the business coach, we believe that this is offset by the absence of the need to spend lengthy periods liaising with participants as discussed above.

As cost minimisation is obviously a major goal of any organisation, we have ruled out a particular element of the suggested process that might defeat this goal in the short term. Essentially, the process of authentication discussed above could be further streamlined by eliminating the need of a participant to request authentication from a business coach. This would be made possible by developing the online form portal in such a way that the completion of the form by an applicant would automatically forwarded a request for authentication to the relevant business coach in that business area. The source of information for this function would come from the training department’s database as outlined in the entity relationship diagram below. However, given that possibly significant amounts of funds would need to be invested in order to get even a basic online form portal integrated into the business process, we have concluded that the inclusion of this authentication function would only add to the cost of the investment. As a result, CBA management may be reluctant to invest in any form on online form portal altogether. It is important to note that in our analysis and models we have assumed that CBA does not have the internal resources to develop an online form portal, and therefore we have assumed that significant costs may be incurred in establishing such a system. Should CBA have the internal resources for such an endeavour, we would recommend the implementation of the later authentication system as it will reduce throughput time as well as the amount of data required to be stored.

Under the proposed enrollment process, we have removed the activity of sending reminders to potential participants. As all of the parties involved in the given business process are full time employees, it is safe to assume that all entities have continuous access to email, telephone, fax etc. Therefore, it seems unnecessary to have to remind participants, as this only increases the amount of handovers in the enrollment process, thereby adding time, costs and also increases the amount of data to be stored. We recognise that some potential participants may oppose this change, therefore we suggest allowing five days for participants to respond. Should no response be received, the applicant should be deemed to have rejected the invitation.

New Narrative:
A potential participant shows interest in attending training and completes an online enrollment. As part of this enrollment form the participant must state which project(s) they are involved in. Once the applicant has entered the projects that they are involved in, the online form will list the courses that will be of use to the applicant. This information is sourced from the training department’s database. Next, the participant would contact a business coach and request for the business coach to authenticate and verify all of the details on the form. If the details are all correct, the business coach will approve the form, which can then be viewed by the training co-ordinator. The training coordinator will then record the participant’s details in the course attendance sheet, and send an email directly to the participant, inviting them to the program. The participant is given five days to respond to the invitation. Once the response is received by the training coordinator, he/she will send a confirmation email to the relevant business coach who previously authorised the participant’s application. Should the applicant fail to respond within five days, the training coordinator simply removes the participant’s details from the course attendance sheet. New Models:

Proposed ERD:

Proposed BPMN:

Proposed DFD