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Scientific management led to the development of the ‘process’ approach. This approach is crucial to our understanding of task management in modern organizations. One of the simplest ways of explaining the process approach is through the diagram known as the transformation model (or the input/output diagram). The basic transformation model is provided in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The basic transformation model

Any job or task can be analyzed (or broken down into smaller parts) using the process approach, by first identifying its inputs and its final outputs, and then by examining the activities that cause the transformation from one to the other. These activities are known as sub-processes. Analysis in this way helps us to understand how we might improve the performance of the task in some way. Let us use the simple example of preparing a sandwich to illustrate analysis. Using the process approach we can analyze the job as having the inputs, sub-processes and outputs seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2. An example transformation model

In Figure 2, you can clearly see the main inputs of food ingredients, equipment (a knife), and human effort and expertise. These feed into the transformation process of making the sandwich which produces the desired output of … a cheese salad sandwich on brown bread (Figure 3)!

Figure 3. A cheese salad sandwich

We could go further with our analysis and examine the sub-processes involved in the transformation in more detail. For example, as you can see the making of the sandwich requires: the spreading of margarine, the slicing or grating of the cheese, the preparation of the salad, the assembly and slicing of the sandwich, and the presentation of the sandwich to the eater. Each of these activities we have analyzed can be broken down even further into its component parts involving transporting of the food products around the kitchen, movement of the knife in buttering and slicing, and so on.

Acknowledgements

Adapted from The Open University’s OpenLearn (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk) material entitled Understanding management: I’m managing thank you! under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence. As such, it is also made available under the same licence agreement.