Scope analysis: Identifying the impact of changes in business process models

Organizations often change their business processes in reaction to changes in the environment or as a result of improvement efforts. These changes lead to adjustments in the Business Process Support (BPS) system. The impact of a change in a business process may extend beyond the specific point that has been changed, affecting preconditions required for other activities, outputs to be created, or requiring new inputs. This article introduces a concept of a scope of a change, whose identification facilitates focused efforts when adjusting the BPS system to changes in business processes. The article presents a taxonomy of modifications that can be made to a process model and characterizes different modification types in terms of possible scopes of the changes made.