Business process analysis: 5 steps, tools, and tips
Summary
Most of us follow routines at work, like steps for new project requests or ways to delegate tasks. These routines are our processes—sets of tasks done in a certain order that form regular workflows. When set up well, business processes guide employees to work in ways that help both the company and themselves.
However, processes are not something you can set up once and ignore. They can become less effective or outdated over time. It's important to regularly review and analyze them to make sure they still work well.
If your processes are no longer effective, look for ways to improve them. Reviewing your processes through business process analysis can help your business grow, increase revenue, and run more smoothly.
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What is business process analysis (BPA)?
Business process analysis (BPA) means reviewing, mapping, and evaluating your business workflows to find inefficiencies, spot ways to improve, and boost performance. It looks at how work moves through your organization to see if your processes are still working or need changes.
Processes are repeatable groups of tasks in a workflow that produce a specific result. Examples include:
Onboarding processes for new hires
Quarterly goal review processes
Decision-making processes used in planning sessions
BPAs fall under the business process management (BPM) umbrella, which encompasses the analysis of your business processes, their maintenance, and improvement. In business process analysis, a business analyst reviews your existing processes and determines if they are still effective or if it might be time for an update.
Business process analysis vs. business analysis
The main difference between BPA and business analysis is that BPA focuses only on processes, while business analysis looks at the entire business.
Aspect: Focus
Business Process Analysis (BPA): Specific workflows and processes
Business Analysis (BA): Entire business operations
Aspect: Scope
Business Process Analysis (BPA): Narrow and tactical
Business Analysis (BA): Broad and strategic
Aspect: Example use case
Business Process Analysis (BPA): Improving the finance tracking process
Business Analysis (BA): Determining overall business profitability
For instance, if you want to improve how you track finances, you would use a BPA. If you want to find out how profitable your business is overall, you would use business analysis.
Why should you conduct a business process analysis?
Business process analysis can make a big difference for your company. A thorough analysis looks deeper than just inputs and outputs, helping you find the real value in your processes and spot areas to improve.
Among the many benefits, business process analyses can help you:
Identify gaps: BPAs show you missing links in your most important operations. Often, these directly affect your bottom line, especially when you're looking at processes for hiring, invoicing, or closing deals.
Outline all available resources: If you're unsure when to say no to a new project, a BPA can help. It outlines all available resources for each process you'd need, similar to capacity planning. This way, you know your capacity and availability for the additional work.
Create new processes that align with current culture and climate: Sometimes, cultural or environmental changes significantly impact your business processes. When teams shift to remote or hybrid work, for example, they need to rethink how they collaborate and communicate. BPAs help you create an entirely new process when the current climate demands business process reengineering.
Reduce redundancies, inefficiencies, and bottlenecks: According to our research, knowledge workers spend a significant portion of their time on duplicated work. BPAs help you improve your process to reduce or eliminate duplicate work. By showing you opportunities to add in reusable templates or rely on automation, you can reduce busywork and free up time for more meaningful tasks.
Improve employee adoption: The better your processes are, the more people will use them. By routinely analyzing your processes, you're doing two things: showing your employees that you care about how they work and making workflows more efficient.
Create a better process flow: Ultimately, your process should keep changing with your work. BPAs create a better process model for your processes, making it easier to implement routine changes and updates in real time.
The 5 steps of business process analysis
Starting a business process analysis cycle with your team may take some getting used to. Most of the time, you will not manage BPAs yourself unless you are a business analyst. Usually, you will hire someone or assign a dedicated person in your company to handle this.
No matter how you start BPAs in your company, following these five steps will help you build a strong foundation.
1. Review how your processes fit into the bigger picture
Your processes should all lead back to larger initiatives and business goals. Processes are the "how" of your business, but they should connect to your strategic goals and objectives.
For example, if your company's vision statement is to give everyone in the world easier access to healthcare, every process you create should support this. The first step in your BPA will be to review existing processes and see how they fit into workflows, departments, and ultimately, those long-term goals that support your company mission.
Create a business process management template2. Collect information on what's happening now
This step is about gathering information. Before you can analyze your processes, you need to understand how they actually work. The best way is to talk to the people who use them every day.
Common data-gathering methods include:
Interviewing key stakeholders
Creating surveys for end users
Reviewing associated KPIs and metrics
This step may take longer than others, but it is worth the effort to fully understand your processes before making any changes.
For example, if you're analyzing how your product team handles backlog refinement and prioritizes their product backlogs, you'd want to interview the developers responsible for them. You'd also want to look at the key performance indicators of current processes, such as how many items remain in the backlog after an Agile sprint is complete.
3. Analyze and map your data
Now it's time for the analysis. Here, you'll want to compile all your data, including:
All process steps
Relevant process diagrams
Associated team members
Current success metrics and KPIs
You can use business process mapping to create a visual layout of your processes and workflows, making them easier to review. Process mapping helps you create a flowchart or other visual map of the current sequence and steps to better visualize processes. In this layout, it's easier to identify patterns and gaps in your process flow.
4. Identify opportunities for improvement
During the analysis step, you will find areas where work is repeated or missing. These are the best places to focus on improving your processes.
For example, let's say your analysis shows that developers spend 3 days planning a sprint backlog. Based on interviews and meeting schedules, you realize different time zones are causing the delay. New technology that fosters asynchronous communication would significantly reduce that time.
5. Make changes
Business process improvement (BPI) is about taking action on everything you've learned. After your BPA, you'll use BPIs to adapt and improve your processes, with a focus on increasing profitability. The last step is to use all of this information to implement changes that improve these processes or help you create new ones.
When should you use business process analysis?
Most business processes benefit from continuous improvement, but there are situations where a BPA is more helpful than others.
Business process analysis is best:
For older, potentially outdated processes
When you notice a fall in productivity or high turnover in certain areas
When launching a new product or team structure to determine if it's viable long-term
After a major organizational change, such as a merger, restructuring, or shift to remote work
When customer complaints or quality issues point to underlying process problems
The key is to plan your BPA reviews regularly rather than waiting until problems become critical. Regular process reviews help you catch inefficiencies early and make incremental improvements over time.
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How do you perform a business process analysis?
The business analyst you hire for your BPAs will likely have their own methods and preferred business process analysis tools, but here are some common ones:
Root cause analysis: Use this to identify the foundation of your processes and ensure they connect back to your company's larger goals.
SWOT analysis: an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This analysis can be helpful because it gives you insight into how your processes are performing and where they can improve.
Gap analysis: Gap analyses show you what's missing in your processes compared to your company's larger goals.
What tools should you use for a business process analysis?
To conduct a BPA, you need an effective business process analysis tool that can keep all of your data in one central source of truth. It works best in a project management tool, where you can automate tasks, generate reports, and send status updates instantly. This ensures that all stakeholders can see the BPA in real time and that it functions in line with all your business process automations.
Who should oversee a business process analysis?
BPA typically falls to a business analyst or a process architect. These professionals have the expertise to interpret data, identify patterns, and recommend improvements. However, successful BPAs require collaboration beyond just the analyst. You'll want to involve:
Process owners: The managers or team leads responsible for the process being analyzed
End users: Employees who use the process daily and can provide ground-level insights
Stakeholders: Anyone who depends on the process outputs or is affected by its performance
IT teams: Especially if the process involves software, integrations, or potential automation
This cross-functional approach ensures you capture diverse perspectives and build buy-in for any changes that result from the analysis.
Business process analysis techniques
Beyond foundational methods such as root cause analysis and SWOT, there are several other techniques that can strengthen your BPA efforts. Here are some of the most effective approaches:
Value stream mapping: This technique helps you visualize the flow of materials and information through your processes. By mapping out each step from start to finish, you can identify waste and find opportunities to streamline operations.
Flowcharting: Create detailed diagrams that illustrate decision points, handoffs, and process sequences. Flowcharts make it easier to spot bottlenecks and understand how work moves between teams.
Observation analysis: Sometimes the best way to understand a process is to watch it in action. Observing employees as they complete tasks can reveal inefficiencies that don't show up in documentation.
RACI matrices: Use a RACI chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) to clarify roles and responsibilities within a process. This helps eliminate confusion about who does what and reduces duplicate effort.
Benchmarking: Compare your processes against industry standards or competitors to identify where you're falling behind and where you excel.
The technique you choose depends on the complexity of the process and what you're trying to achieve. Often, combining multiple methods gives you the most comprehensive view of how your processes are performing.
How BPA supports automation and AI
One of the most valuable outcomes of business process analysis is identifying opportunities for automation. When you map out your processes and understand each step, you can pinpoint repetitive tasks that are prime candidates for automation. BPA creates a pipeline of automation opportunities by revealing:
Manual, repetitive tasks: Data entry, status updates, and routine approvals can often be automated once you understand the rules that govern them.
Handoff points: Processes that move between teams or systems often have delays. Automation can speed up these transitions.
Decision points with clear criteria: If a decision follows consistent rules, AI can help make those decisions faster and more consistently.
With AI-powered tools becoming more accessible, the insights from your BPA can help you prioritize which processes to automate first. Focus on processes that are:
High-volume: Tasks performed frequently across teams
Rules-based: Decisions that follow consistent, predictable criteria
Time-consuming: Manual work that delays more strategic activities
Then use the time your team saves to focus on work that requires human judgment and creativity.
Improve your business operations with BPA
Business process analyses peek behind the scenes of your business operations. They show you how you, your team, and your business work. This information is a goldmine of possibilities; use the results of your BPA to boost productivity and improve workflows.
Ready to take control of your processes and drive better outcomes for your team? Get started with Asana to keep all your process documentation, analysis, and improvements in one central place. Automating your processes allows you to do more with less; create templates in Asana for recurring processes and easily update them with every business process analysis.
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