Going through this material will take you approximately 30 minutes of watching videos and 20 minutes of reading the texts.

Qualitative analysis is a broad topic and is closely related to process optimization techniques. To get familiar with the topic and with selected types of qualitative analysis, you could watch the following video. This video explains the principle of value-added analysis.

A more detailed metric you can use for your qualitative analysis is waste analysis. The waste analysis originates from the Toyota company and the work of Taiichi Ohno. If you are not familiar with Lean management, I recommend you to go through these two Harvard Business Review articles (if you have exceeded the monthly free articles, you can find pdf of the articles through MUNI EBSCO Discovery service - ezdroje.muni.cz):

• Womack, J. and Jones, D.: From Lean Production to the Lean Enterprise
• Swank, C.: The Lean Service Machine

A short introduction to BPA waste analysis together with some examples of types of waste can be seen in the following video.

Besides analyzing the content of the process, you can involve the stakeholders in the analytical process because stakeholders of the process can possess crucial knowledge about the health of the process. Moreover, you have usually analyzed stakeholders of the processes in the strategical analysis part, therefore you can use the list of the stakeholders in this part of the analysis. The reason behind the stakeholder analysis is to gather as many issues of the process as possible. And even though a skilled process analyst can find lots of issues by herself, the input of stakeholders can be very beneficial.

The input of (not only) the stakeholder analysis can be the issue register. In the register, you can synthesize all the problems you identified during the qualitative analysis, together with stakeholders that are affected by the issues.

To further analyze issues that can be candidates for optimization, you need to find the causes of these issues. For this, you can use some root-cause analysis. In the following video, the Ishikawa diagram is introduced. However, you can use a different way, how to find out the root of the issue. A different example could be the Theory of Constraint thinking tools and the Current Reality Tree.

Supplementary materials

If you would like to see a bit different point of view on the topic, you can watch a lecture given by Marlon Dumas (main author of the textbook of this course).