Many of today's strictly sequentially executed intellectual work steps can be partially parallelised.
Parallelisation gets possible through the deployment of predefined building blocks and the detailled, process step-spanning linking of work results.
Parallelisation
The benefits of parallelisation outcrops in several respects:
The early and closer co-operation of process steps generates an increased awareness of the engaged persons of the overall process. Feedback occurs earlier than with strictly sequential ways of work. This yields better balanced results, that take into account the concerns of multiple process steps. Moreover, caused by the multi-assessor supervision, errors or sub-optimal solutions will be revealed or avoided more easily.
The earlier involvement of subsequent process steps reduces the number of iteration steps .
Working in parallel saves time.
To determine whether activities in a process chain can be parallelised or not, the degree of complexity or the amount of required creativity are much less significant than their frequency of occurrence and their structurability. Because parallelisation ultimately depends is based on agreements on the common procedures. We plan the co-operation.
Some potential application fields of the solution presented here, are the following:
For further concretisation of parallelisation, let us consider two process steps PS1 and PS2 out of a longer process chain that is aiming at developing new business strategies.
In step PS1 a product palette shall be developed. Then, in PS2, market analyses will be planned for the individual product candidates. So, PS1 and PS2 follow each other logically. Nevertheless, PS1 and PS2 are partially parallelisable by applying the methodology described below, so that we obtain the following working procedure:
Process step PS1 starts off by defining a first selection of potential products.
Even before PS1 has worked out the product details, PS2 start to take over the relevant information from PS1 and to create its own marketing view on PS1's current results. First groundwork for suitable kinds of market analyses are being defined. Besides, PS2 feeds back to PS1 available marketing experiences referring to one of the selected product candidates.
While PS2 is still working, PS1 starts re-designing his/her first draft and detailing the products. Doing this, he/she considers PS2's comments and replaces one of the products by a slightly modified, but significantly more promising variant.
The solution principle is simple: the activities performed in the relevant parts of the process and the kind of results are controlled to a certain degree.
Desired:
Iterative top-down work performed in several parts of the process in parallel on a compatible level of detail.
Touching points, known on a given level of detail (interfaces) between individual results.
The Awareness of the persons involved of the activities in other process steps and of the correlations between own results and those of the other process steps.
Not desired:
Jumps between levels of detail.
Uncoordinated changes of interfaces/touching points to other parts of the process.
These requirements can be met by utilizing building blocks and a sophisticated linking of the partial results spanning the boarders of the process steps. Furthermore, it is helpful to tag objects that are currently being changed.
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