Using Model-based Approach for Assessing Standard Operating

Procedures

Mohammad Alhaj

Al-Ahliyya Amman University, AAU, Amman, Jordan

Keywords: Standard Operating Procedure, Model-Driven Engineering, Requirement Engineering, Goal Model, Scenario

Model, GRL, UCM.

Abstract: Standard Operating Procedures are essential for organizations that want to maintain an efficient and organized

local tasks. They are used develop the activities important for completing their internal operations in

accordance with industry regulations and business standards. A growing interest and investment have been

taken regarding developing and assessing the SOPs. It is desirable to detect any deficiencies in the SOPs that

contradict with the policies and regulations and do not allow achieving the business goals early in the process

when corrective actions can be more easily made. This paper proposes a model-based approach that generates

goal and scenario models for the standard operating procedures, augmented with quantitative indicators. The

generated models allow to model the behaviour of the standard operating procedures in a formal way and

evaluate their performance measures.

1 INTRODUCTION

Many organizations are using standard operating

procedures (SOPs) to develop the activities essential

for completing their local tasks in accordance with

industry regulations and business standards. SOPs are

a set of instructions and guidelines that formalize the

business processes in an organization. They define

the blueprint of the actions, templates and forms

necessary to complete an organization workflow.

Organizations are using SOPs to improve the

productivity, formalize the communication and

responsibilities between the working teams and

maintain the consistency and quality of the business

process in a timely manner.

A periodic process of developing and maintaining

the SOPs is described in figure 1. The business goals

describe the expected accomplishments of an

organizations in the near future and support the

performance chart to measure the organization

situation. The business goals are used to outline the

organization’s guidelines that governs its actions in a

form of policies and regulations. They also are used

to identify the measures of the organization’s

abilities and behaviour quality in a form of

performance metrics. The policies and regulations

consist of the formal statements, consents that are

defined to achieve the business goals. They are also

defined to achieve the main principle of creating and

maintaining the SOPs continuously. The performance

metrics and feedback are used to evaluate the SOPs

which are augmented back to the business goal for

further improvements.

Figure 1: Periodic process of developing and maintaining

the SOPs.

A growing interest and investment have been taken

regarding developing and assessing the SOPs.

However, the typical approaches of the development

often neglect the assessment procedure that supposed

to be realized with respect to the defined regulations,

Alhaj, M.

Using Model-based Approach for Assessing Standard Operating Procedures.

DOI: 10.5220/0009388903590364

In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2020), pages 359-364

ISBN: 978-989-758-421-3

359

policies and business goals. It is desirable to detect

any deficiencies in the SOPs that contradict with the

policies and regulations and do not allow achieving

the business goals early in the process when

corrective actions can be more easily made.

In this paper, we present the exploration of a

model-based approach where we model the

evaluation process of the SOPs using User

Requirement Notation (URN). URN supports two

modelling languages: the Goal-oriented Requirement

Language (GRL) which models business goals with

stakeholders, behaviours, and key performance

indicators (KPIs) represent performance metrics; and

the Use Case Map language (UCM) that models

business scenarios with sub-scenarios, actions and

artifacts. The new approach aims to evaluate the

SOPs at the early phases of the development and

provide and formalized way of assessment. The paper

is organized as follows: section 2 presents the

background and related work; Section 3 an overview

of our model-based approach; Section 4 A case study

of evaluation modelling and analysis followed by

conclusions and future work in Section 5.

2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED

WORK

The user requirement modelling is used to model the

notion of organization hierarchy and its relationship

with the stakeholders; also model the behaviour of

different constituents within the organization. It is

used in recent literature researches such as quality

assurance (Alhaj, 2019) and business process

management (Weiss and Amyot, 2005). User

requirement modelling allows modellers to identify

requirements for the target system and validate their

compliance with the user demand. It combines

between the requirement’s objectives and behaviour;

and bridge the gap between the informal presentation

of the user requirements and the formal one.

User requirement notation (URN) (ITU-T, 2018)

is an international standard notation for the

International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) that

models graphically the requirement’s goals and

scenarios. URN supports the elicitation, specification,

analysis, and evaluation of requirements. URN

modelling is used to discover and describe

requirements for a proposed system or process and

analyze any kind of responsive structure. URN

language supports two graphical modelling

languages: a) the GRL that describes business goals

and allows the modelers to describe intentions (e.g.,

goals, tasks, indicators) their decomposition structure

(e.g., sub goals, stubs), link types (e.g., dependencies,

contribution) and the corresponding stakeholders

(actors, agents, teams); b) the Use case Map (UCM)

that describes business scenarios and models

scenarios as a sequence of actions (responsibilities)

and sub-scenarios (stubs) synchronized by timers

(Timers and waiting places) and controlled by

concurrencies and branches (And/Or Fork, And/Or

Join). The workflow of the scenario can be owned by

different components, such as actor, team, process,

object and agent. The goal models and scenario

models are created using an open source graphical

editor called jUCMNav (jUCMNav, 2016).

jUCMNav supports generating and managing GRL

and UCM models and provides features to utilize

strategies using various analysis algorithms. Other

examples of goal languages such as i star (i*) that

models both as-is and to-be situations (Ayala, 2005)

and KAOS (Darimont, 1997) that allows building

requirements models and used capture user

requirements at the problem domain. Different

modelling languages are also used to describe

behaviours and scenarios such as Business Process

Management (BPM) (OMG, 2011) and UML

Activity diagram (OMG, 2017).

Different researches and case studies have been

conducted for designing and evaluating SOPs. In (

Federal Emergency Management Agency United

States Fire Administration, 1999) authors provide a

guide that explains how SOPs can be developed, lists

topic areas that should be covered, and describes

various styles and formats. While in (Community

Workers, 2014) researchers outline a process to assist

with the development of workplace-specific Safe

Operating Procedures for plant, hardware, chemicals,

work tasks and processes that have the potential to

cause harm to workers, plant, material or the

environment as identified from risk assessments.

Roza_Albareta in (Roza Albareta and Mursanto,

2019) used the scrum method to design a standard

operating procedure in software development based

on three steps: Initiation, Development, and Iteration

Planning. de Ferluc in (de Ferluc, 2018) propose a

new approach to formalize the test and procedure

activities using the open-source Capella modelling

tool and its associated methodology Arcadia. de

Freitas (Freitas, 2016) propose an evaluation for three

standard operational procedures (SOPs) using an

application of a questionnaire and to verify whether

the SOPs are effective and assess the necessity for

improvement.

In summary, it is learned that the above proposed

works are paper-based describing the process of

ENASE 2020 - 15th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

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developing and evaluating SOPs with respect to the

industry regulations and business standards. The

major advantage of our proposed approach compared

to the others is that it is model-based that uses URN

notations for SOPs evaluation.

3 APPROACH OVERVIEW

3.1 The Development Process of SOP

Constituencies in organizations are using SOPs at

different levels of management to facilitate and

organize their regularly recurring work. The SOPs

describe step by step details of the work instructions

that conduct the operations correctly and always in

the same routine. They are supported by different

organization forms and templates which can be

presented as paper-based or web-based. Many

constituencies at are participating in the process of

developing and validating the SOP. Ideally, all

constituencies need to participate actively at all

levels, however, it is recognized that this ideal

approach may not be achieved with ease and become

consistent all the times. The SOP development

process is an end to end activities that is used to build

an efficient and reliable work instruction to meet the

organization goals and comply with the internal

policies and regulations.

Figure 2: The Development Process of SOP.

Figure 2 describes the periodic process of SOP

development:

1. Planning phase: it clearly identifies the initial

definitions of the SOP such as the purpose of the

development, the scope and limitations, the

related policies and regulations, the performance

metrics that will impact the organization goals.

Also, it specifies the involved constituencies, the

target audience, their expected skills and

language.

2. Implementation phase: it focuses on the template

format and writing style of the SOP based on

whether it is a new or an existing. In many cases,

the layout of the implemented SOP is built from

a pre-existing one.

3. Assessment phase: the implemented SOPs are

evaluated and reviewed using different kinds of

assessment methods and feedback, such as

surveys, periodic progress reports and log files.

Target audience are involved in assessing and

adjusting the SOPs under test.

4. Utilization phase: SOPs are distributed as paper-

based or web-based in this phase. Training

session could be provided, if needed, to elevate

the audience skills. Also, feedback from

audience is documented for future SOP update

and enhancement.

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are

written documents or work instructions that detail all

of the steps involved in a procedure or process. The

SOP development services include end-to-end level

mapping of processes and formatting SOPs to the

template and organization structures. In this section,

we propose a model-based approach that can be used

to review systematically the measures of the SOPs

with respect to the goals and objectives of an

organization. Our proposed approach provides two

levels of modelling:

a. The Goal model which describes the objectives

and goals of an organization. These goals

represent what the organization expects to

accomplish over the next years. The objectives

and goals can be achieved by a multiple of tasks

with the ability to assessed by different

performance metrics. Each Task represents an

SOP in the organization which can be realized as

operation behaviour described in the underlying

scenario models. Different kinds of

constituencies are also involved as active actors

and stakeholders.

b. A group of scenario models to describe activities

of the underlying SOPs. A Scenario is a

collection of procedures and steps owned by

different stakeholders and executed in a certain

order based on multiple rules and constraints.

The performance of SOPs can be measured using

different performance quality metrics. These

measures are added to the goal model and scenario

model of the SOPs, such as:

 Processing time: the expected completion time of

an SOP.

Using Model-based Approach for Assessing Standard Operating Procedures

361

 Efficiency: the ratio between the active time and

the waiting time during the processing time of

an SOP.

 Usability: the ease of use and learnability.

 Throughput: the number of completed SOPs per

month.

 The number of constituencies involved in

completing the SOP.

3.2 The Model-based Approach

In our proposed approach, we introduce the user

requirement notation (URN) to describe two level of

modelling as in figure 3. The proposed approach is

supported by jUCMNav, an open source eclipse

plugin. jUCMNav is a graphical editor that is used to

improve the goal and scenario modelling through rich

graphical formatting features. The coloring scheme is

one of these features. It measures and monitor the

achievement degree of the model elements using

three main levels and different shades for values in

between: unsatisfied (red), neutral (yellow), and

satisfied (green).

We use GRL modelling to build a hierarchical

goal model. The organization mission defines the

high-level goals (softgoal) while the SOPs define the

tasks. The contribution relationship describes how an

element participate to the other elements in GRL

model; the contribution impact can be within a range

of +100% (positive) to -100% (negative). The

performance metrics are also defined in the goal

model as key performance indicators (KPIs). KPI

defines the performance quality metrics that

contributes to different SOPs in the model. A KPI has

an evaluation value that measures the current

situation. It ranges between the +100% (positive),

+0% (neutral) or -100% negative values.

Stakeholders are represented as actors to define their

ownership and responsibility in the goal model.

There is also a group of usecase map models

(UCM) that describe the behaviour of each SOP

where components represent actors and artifacts,

responsibilities represent actions, stubs represent sub-

maps and workflow is modelled using starting points,

ending points, and sequential, alternative and

concurrent flows.

Figure 3: An arbitrary SOP goal model and Scenario model.

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4 CASE STUDY

In this section, we introduce a sample of our SOP

evaluation modelling approach (figure 4). The sample

is a goal model and scenario model developed at the

Admission and Registration department in Al-

Ahliyya Amman University (2019) as a part of an on-

going project. The project aims to monitor and

improve of the Standard Operating Procedures at Al-

Ahliyya Amman University to obtain the best quality

of service. The values of performance metrics defined

in the SOP model are extracted from several

admission and registration reports. These reports are

issued weekly, biweekly and monthly. They contain

the number of the new applications, the day and time

of submission/completion, the names and roles of the

involved constituencies, the delay time and cause of

the delay, …etc. These values are used in evaluating

the performance of the SOPs with respect to the target

values.

Figure 4 describes the GRL goal model where the

Admission and Registration Department represents

the actor. The top-level goal is the University Mission

as defined in (Al-Ahliyya Amman University, 2019).

A sample of three SOPs: College Admission,

Semester Registration and Course Withdraw,

contributes to the university mission by 25%. The

goal model also defines three key performance

indicators (KPIs): processing time, throughput and

efficiency. Each one of them contributes to the SOPs

in a range of 10% to 75%. The evaluation values of

these KPIs are calculated using the underlying UCM

scenario models. These values are: Processing

time=14, Efficiency= 85 and Throughout= 28. The

goal model shows that the performance of the College

Admission (evaluation value= 23) and the Course

Withdraw (evaluation value= 49) are relatively weak

this is due to long processing time and throughput.

The performance of the Semester Registration is

acceptable (evaluation value= 77). The overall

performance of the University Mission is weakly

acceptable (evaluation value= 35).

Figure 5 describe is a sample of College

Admission SOP. In this scenario two actors are

involved: the New Applicant and the Admission

Office. The scenario begins when a new applicant

performs a preliminary preparations which may

include, accrediting of high school degree and

language test. The new applicant can either applies an

online or paper-based admission application. The

admission office is then review the application and

the waiting time depends on the queue of new

applications. The admission office is then check for

the completion of the required documents and contact

the new applicant if it is not complete. When the

admission application is complete, it creates an

admission file for a new application. During the daily

meeting of the admission committee, a decision is

made regarding accepting or rejecting the new

applications. The new applicant is then contacted and

informed of the status of his application. If the

application is accepted, the new applicant is informed

with the pre-approved admission and requested to pay

the admission fees. If the applicant is rejected, he will

be informed with reason of the rejection.

Figure 4: Case study goal model.

Using Model-based Approach for Assessing Standard Operating Procedures

363

Figure 5: Scenario model of College Admission SOP.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The paper proposes a new model-based approach that

allows the SOPs to be modelled using GRL language

for goal modelling and UCM language for scenario

modelling. In our approach, we use GRL models at

the validation and verification phase to describe the

organization goals, associated with the SOPs, while

the UCM models are used to describe the behaviour

of the SOPs using branching, concurrency and

conditional workflows. Our proposed approach

describes the performance metrics in GRL models as

KPIs, to measure the quality of the SOPs and their

compliance with the organization goals. The UCM

model can be used for performance analysis in order

to calculate the throughput, branching delays and the

overall delay. Stakeholders are represented as actors

to define their ownership and responsibility in the

goal model and scenario model.

As future work, we are planning to extend the model-

based approach to include the industry regulations

and business standards in the GRL model and extend

the performance metrics. Also, we are planning to use

our approach to model more complex case studies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Our thanks to Al-Ahliyya Amman University for the

help and support they provide during the evaluation

process.

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