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Multi-level Team Assignment in Social Business Processes: An Algorithm and Simulation Study

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Abstract

Business Process Management (BPM) systems usually neglect the human and social aspects (or team effects) involved in business process execution. Our work fills a large gap in literature by addressing multi-level teams that arise in business processes where teams are formed at both the task and process levels. In this paper, we develop a methodology called BPMTeams based on social network analysis for building an execution model for a social BPM. This model is used to make resource assignments to form dynamic teams that perform various team-based activities in a process. We further develop various resource assignment strategies and evaluate them using parameters estimated from a real data set in the IT incident management domain to understand how team effects play out in social business processes. The overall team effect in a process is analyzed at two levels: as a task team effect where the synergistic role of a team in a specific task is realized; and a process team effect that arises from inter-team synergies across the individual task teams in a process. The results offer some balanced insights for the interplay of these effects by highlighting the benefits and disadvantages of teams selected by a purely data-driven approach.

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  1. https://simpy.readthedocs.io

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, USA

    Rong Liu

  2. Smeal College of Business, Penn State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Akhil Kumar

  3. Seegene, Seoul, South Korea

    Juhnyoung Lee

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  1. Rong Liu
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  2. Akhil Kumar
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Correspondence to Rong Liu or Juhnyoung Lee.

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Liu, R., Kumar, A. & Lee, J. Multi-level Team Assignment in Social Business Processes: An Algorithm and Simulation Study. Inf Syst Front 24, 1949–1969 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-021-10211-y

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