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

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.