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Chapter 6. How Big is an Activity?
How much work should an activity represent? How long should a user take to
complete an activity? For activities that involve the user interacting with a program,
thinking about the problem, and then responding correctly, consider these
guidelines:
An activity is done by one person (if you want another person involved, that is
a reason to create the next activity).
An activity is done at one sitting (usually there is no long time spent doing other
things in the middle of the activity).
An activity should take 5 to 10 minutes or more on average to complete (a user
could be expected to do 5 to 20 an hour and keep that pace all day).
But there are some exceptions. You may choose to keep your process at a higher
level (in application development, write the “class,” unit test the program, and other
things that may take days). A manager's sign-off only takes a minute, but must be
done. Exceptions are not necessarily bad. But when you design one, ensure that
you have a good reason.
6.1 Performance and Capacity Considerations
Typically, FlowMark is used to automate processes of “knowledge workers.” These
are people who are paid good salaries to think. If your design expects a user to do
two activities a minute and keep it up hour after hour, there is not much thinking
going on; that is more of a mindless task. How long does it take to read a screen
or two, analyze the information, make good decisions, and enter some data or a
response? Probably more than 30 seconds.
Consider the potential overhead as you design. When a user selects an activity
from the work list, there must be communication between client and server, the
specified application program must be called, probably loaded from disk, be
initialized, and then communicate with the user. There are applications that take 10
seconds (or much more) when you initiate them from an icon or the command line.
This is a lot of overhead that will impact workers if you have designed what you
believe is a 30-second activity.
Another possible impact of very small activities, particularly for cases where you
intend users to do significant volumes of them, is the affect it has on the user's
work list (it can get very large), and on the network traffic, constantly adding,
updating, and deleting things from the work lists. We will say more about the size
of user work lists in subsequent sections.
There is some amount of work required from FlowMark when you go from activity
to activity in your process. The completion of one activity is recorded at the server,
which performs navigation evaluation to determine what is next, executes staff
resolution (who is to do it), and sends the activity item to those who should receive
it. While perhaps not a major factor, try not to let the overhead of doing something
become a significant part of the work done. Use the tool only where it adds
significant value.
Copyright IBM Corp. 1996, 1998 11