Process Variability Modeling for Complex Organizations

When organizations provide similar services and share the same mission they often behave similarly. This, in particular, is true in the context of Public Administration where different offices organize the provisioning of services to citizens in similar ways. This paper presents a novel notation and approach to support variability modeling for those scenarios in which it is difficult to fully foresee in advance how variability can affect the various process perspectives. Notation and approach are inspired on feature modeling where features are used to represents activities of a processes family that can be differently implemented. Applying the proposed approach it is possible to derive a kind of partially predefined process model variant, which is a set of fragments, that in a subsequent step needs to be augmented with additional elements to then fully define process behavior. Notation and approach has been validated on real case studies with encouraging results.