Homework 1 (6 points)
Task 1. [3 points]
NewHome is a construction company specialized in house renovations, with over 20 years of experience transforming homes to meet modern standards of comfort, functionality, and aesthetics. Their expertise spans kitchen and bathroom renovations, full-home remodeling, structural upgrades, and energy-efficient improvements. NewHome has built a reputation for "affordable excellence", delivering high-quality renovations that enhance property value and improve living spaces, while adjusting to the client's budget and financing requirements. As part of its commitment to customer satisfaction, NewHome handles all aspects of house renovation, from initial vision and requirements, to design and planning, permitting processes, and seamless execution from design to completion. NewHome tailors each project to the clients’ unique needs. Some clients prefer to go with "standard renovations", based on predefined project templates and mid-range construction materials, while other clients prefer to go for high-end, "customized renovations" to fit their taste. As an additional service, NewHome partners with financial providers to help clients organize financing solutions tailored to their needs, through flexible payment plans and renovation loans. NewHome relies on over 200 employees (salespeople, project managers, engineers, architects and interior designers, lead builders, etc.), and a network of 100+ contractors, to deliver the best craftsmanship in every one of their projects.
Following a phase of rapid growth in the past five years, NewHome's COO is concerned about a sharp drop in NPS scores and a rise in customer complaints. Issues have emerged at multiple points in the renovation lifecycle, including:
- Customers report that initial design consultations lack clarity, leading to misalignment between expectations and final results.
- Material delays and scheduling conflicts with contractors have led to longer project timelines.
- Post-renovation service requests (e.g., warranty claims, defect fixes) are often met with slow responses, frustrating customers.
- Additionally, NewHome is experiencing high staff turnover, and some long-term contractors have become less reliable than before.
The management team does not have a full understanding of what processes it needs to prioritize. The company does not have much in the way of process documentation.
You are an analyst at a medium-sized consultancy company, which has been contracted by NewHome's COO to map the processes at NewHome in order to recommend and prioritize improvement efforts, and to set up a process-oriented architecture in the organization to ensure that processes are continuously monitored and optimized.
You want to come to the first meetings at NewHome well-prepared, with a strong understanding of the possible processes that you will find at NewHome, so that you can ask the right questions and quickly put up an effective plan for the first week of this project. Ideally, you want to hit the first meeting with a "draft process architecture", which you would refine as you get to know how NewHome operates.
Deliverable: A process architecture including:
- An architecture diagram containing process groups structured according to Porter's framework (see Practice 2), plus a brief description of each process group in the architecture diagram (2-3 sentences per process).
- At least two major value chains (process flows). Each value chain should be followed by a brief description of each of the processes in the value chain (2-3 sentences per process).
Your solution will be evaluated with respect to the following criteria:
- Clarity & Organization: Is the process architecture structured in a way that makes it easy to understand?
- Relevance: Are the identified processes appropriate for a company like NewHome?
- Coverage & Depth: Does the solution cover a reasonable number of processes (not too few or too many), and does it provide meaningful descriptions?
- Feasibility & Insightfulness: Does the architecture provide a solid foundation for understanding NewHome’s operational challenges and potential improvements?"
Hint: If your process architecture contains more than 25 elements (processes or groups of processes), it's probably too much. If it contains less than 8 elements, it's probably too little.
You may use the following descriptions of renovation processes as a starting point:
- Dave Fox Home Remodeling Steps: A Checklist to Help Plan and Organize Your Renovation
- The Spruce House Renovation Guide: How to Plan and Prepare
Task 2. [3 points] Model the following business process using BPMN.
Make sure your models follow the modeling conventions introduced in the lectures and abide to the syntax rules of BPMN (only the rules numbered "BPMN XXXX" and not the rules numbered "Style XXXX").
The two textual descriptions given above may contain irrelevant details. It is part of your task to discern what should be put in the BPMN models and what should be left out.
For Task 2, you should submit:
- A top-level BPMN diagram which decomposes the prescription fulfillment process into multiple subprocesses.
- One BPMN diagram for each subprocess.
Use lanes and pools in the subprocesses (not in the top-level process). There is no need for data objects, but they can be useful occasionally to represent major objects.
What to submit?
Please submit the homework as a single package: zip file or .7z file or .tar.gz.
Please organize and name the files in the package clearly, so that it is clear which file(s) corresponding to the first task and which ones correspond to the second task.
If you have completed the homework with another student (teams of two), please write the name of your team-mate in the "Comments" field of the homework submission form. Only one submission per pair of students is needed.
Reminder on plagiarism policy
We don't want to have to say the following, but it's better to say it upfront. Please be reminded that plagiarism in any form is not tolerated. We will be reporting all cases where we have some evidence of plagiarism. You can get an F in the entire course due to a small amount of plagiarism. Whatever you submit, it must be 100% the product of the work of you and your team-mate (using AI assistants if you wish). For the same reason, do not share your solution or a partial solution with others (except with your team-mate).
Use of ChatGPT or other Large Language Models (LLMs)
Notwithstanding the above note about plagiarism, you are allowed and encouraged to use an LLM (e.g. ChatGPT) or similar LLM-enhanced search engines (e.g. Perplexity) for this homework, provided that you explicitly state in your homework which AI assistant(s) you have used. When evaluating your solution, we will take as a reference an out-of-the box answer obtained by providing the above description to a state-of-the-art LLM. We expect your solution to better fulfill the requirements of this homework relative to what an LLM produces out-of-the-box with a single prompt.