Enhancing Product Development with Reusable Components

Summary: In fast-paced business environments, different departments may request similar workflows, and handling these requests efficiently is crucial. Recognizing shared business requirements and creating reusable, composable workflow models can save time, reduce maintenance, and enhance consistency across the organization.

Takeaways:

• Utilizing reusable workflow components allows for quicker and more accurate development, reducing the need for duplicative efforts and facilitating easier updates.

• Identifying and implementing shared business requirements early in the process development stage ensures that changes are applied uniformly, enhancing efficiency and coherence across the organization.

In the fast-paced environment of daily business operations, it's common for various departments to have specific needs that require timely solutions. For instance, the HR department might request an approval workflow that includes review and inquiry features. This seems straightforward enough, and the modeling team can usually handle such requests quickly.

But what happens when the legal department comes forward with a similar requirement? Should a new workflow be custom-built, or would it be more efficient to adapt and reuse the existing workflow created for HR?

Enterprises operate on a large scale, consisting of various departments, each potentially managing its own business processes. As enterprises grow and expand, the number of underlying processes increases, making coordination at scale challenging. How should enterprises handle this increasing complexity?

Creating a new process whenever requested might seem like an easy solution. However, this approach can quickly become problematic:

• Maintenance: Each process and its underlying models require maintenance. The more processes and models there are, the more maintenance is needed, making coordination more challenging.

• Changing requirements: Enterprises are dynamic. When requirements change, ensuring that these changes are applied to all relevant processes is essential. Otherwise, inconsistencies and confusion among end-users may arise.

Recognizing shared business requirements

One way of solving this challenge is to look at the overlapping business requirements departments often have.

Recognizing and addressing overlapping business requirements among departments is crucial for maintaining efficient business processes at scale. Failure to do so can lead to inconsistencies and confusion for end-users. Therefore, it is essential to address these issues early in the business process development stage.

Reusability and composability

One reason enterprises struggle to adapt to market changes is their current application portfolio. Enterprises need applications that can be assembled, reassembled, and extended. Composability addresses the inter-relationships of these components, focusing on creating structural capabilities at all levels.

Designing business process models from scratch requires extensive resources, including system and modeling language knowledge, and time. This can become costly and prone to inaccuracies. Reusability, therefore, is an important concept that allows for a more sustainable way of working. It saves time and resources, reduces users’ work, and minimizes the risk of mistakes.

Think of reusable components as Lego blocks. Each block is defined in detail but can be reused many times to build larger, more complex products. This reduces development and maintenance efforts.

The same concept applies to Flowable. A model can be created to be reusable across multiple processes.

An example: Approval case

Consider an approval process used by multiple departments. These processes might differ in topic but often share a common structure. For example, the approval team can be defined dynamically, allowing the same approval process to be used for both the HR and legal departments. Any changes or new features need to be implemented only once, automatically integrating into both workflows.

For instance, if a new requirement states that an email must be sent after every approval, regardless of the department, this functionality only needs to be implemented once in a reusable model. In contrast, if there were multiple approval workflow models, this new email functionality would need to be implemented multiple times, ensuring consistency across all implementations.

A reusable approval workflow model serves as a shared model. These models should be declared and maintained collaboratively, like a shared library. While creating and maintaining such a library requires additional effort, it establishes a sustainable foundation for your platform, enabling faster, more concise, and higher-quality business processes throughout your organization.

Identifying shared model candidates

Some shared models are obvious candidates for reuse, such as those interfacing with other systems. For example, a process fetching user information from an external system should use a dynamic user ID rather than a static one.

While identifying these candidates can be tricky initially, the effort is valuable from both a technical and business requirements perspective. Proper documentation is essential, as it serves as the source of truth for business requirements.

Where to start your reusability journey?

Here are some suggestions to begin your reusability journey:

• Define the business requirements for your workflow.

• Review the requirements and break down the end-to-end workflow into reasonable sub-items.

• Determine if these sub-items can be utilized in other workflows as a shared model.

• Identify the static and dynamic data within this workflow, distinguishing between hard-coded elements and those that should be configurable in other workflows.

• Create the model and its documentation and make it available in a shared library.

• Communicate the existence of the shared model to relevant stakeholders.

Conclusion

Considering whether a model can serve a general purpose should occur early in business process development, especially when the platform must support multiple processes. Reviewing business requirements with a focus on reusability is essential.

Regularly reviewing existing models can also help increase consistency. Team sessions involving all stakeholders, including business representatives, can reduce duplication in requirements and model functionality, improving overall project quality and consistency. Effective communication and collaboration are key.

Happy modeling.