Ranking critical activities in process architectures

Identification of important activities in a process architecture is a complex task. This paper takes a network perspective approach: Process architectures are represented as activity networks and are modelled as a Discrete-Time Markov Chain (DTMC). Here we propose a DTMC-based component ranking method (Markov chain) to rank important activities in a variety of process architectures of complex system development projects. Analysis of the results show that the proposed model possesses the capability to highly rank critical activities in a process architecture that are capable of either leading to task volatility i.e. increase the probability of rework, have the tendency to cause large iteration cycles, posing a high risk to the process in terms of delay and failure, or leading to unplanned rework. The results are also compared with other widely used network metrics, namely, closeness, betweenness and eigenvector centrality. In our pilot study on four different process architectures, Markov chain outperformed other ranking strategies in highly ranking the significant activities of the process architecture.