Process architecture
Domain 01 of the eight in the NBOP standard. This page explains what the domain is and how it fails. It does not say how much the domain is worth, because that has not been decided yet and will not be decided here.
Its number in the published standard, which is an order rather than a ranking.
The standard is at version 0.9. The weight of this domain is not set.
Domains you need personal accountability in to be eligible. This is one of the eight.
The standard an assessment is built from, readable in full, permanently.
What the standard says
Identifying, documenting, and maintaining the processes an organisation depends on. Judging which processes warrant documentation and which do not. Keeping documentation current as practice changes.
That is the whole of the published entry. Everything below expands it and is not itself the standard. Where the two ever disagree, the standard is the document that governs.
What this domain is
Process architecture is the set of decisions about which work is a defined process, where one process ends and the next begins, and which of them are written down. It is called architecture rather than documentation because the choices are structural. Deciding that something is a process at all is a decision. Deciding where its boundary sits is a decision. Deciding not to document it is a decision too, and it is the one this domain is really about.
The work is not producing procedures. Most organisations can produce procedures. The work is judging which processes the business would not survive losing, maintaining those against drift, and declining to spend on the rest.
What it looks like when it is working
- You can name the processes the business would stop without, and the list is short enough to say out loud.
- Each one has an owner who is permitted to change it, not just to follow it.
- The documentation that exists is the documentation people actually use, and it is current because using it is how it gets corrected.
- When something breaks, the conversation can point at a step rather than at a person.
How it fails
The first failure is having no architecture at all. Everything lives in the heads of four people, the business runs well, and the exposure is invisible until one of them is away.
The second is the one competent operators walk into, because it looks like the opposite of the first. Documentation becomes an artefact rather than an instrument: four hundred pages, none revised in a year, which nobody reads and nobody will delete. It creates the impression of process maturity while the real process stays oral. The tell is who the document was written for. Documentation written for an audit reads differently from documentation written for the person doing the work at four on a Friday, and only one of the two gets used.
Why competent operators miss it
Documenting everything feels like rigour, and rigour is the instinct of a good operator. The judgement the standard asks for runs the other way: deciding which processes do not warrant documentation, saying so, and carrying the cost of that decision on purpose rather than by neglect.
What accountability here actually means
Eligibility for NBOP-CP asks for personal accountability in at least four of the eight domains. Personal is the operative word. Having worked somewhere that did this well is not accountability, and neither is having been consulted. The test is whether the decision was yours to make and yours to answer for.
For this domain, that looks like at least one of the following.
- You decided what got documented and what did not, and you owned what followed.
- You maintained a process against drift, which means you noticed the drift.
- You retired documentation that had stopped describing the work, rather than leaving it standing.
What NBOP does not claim about this domain yet
Not how much it is worth. The weight of each domain is being set by a job task analysis of practising operators, rating tasks on criticality and on frequency, and the weights are derived from those paired ratings rather than from editorial preference. Until that closes, the standard states equal provisional weighting and says so on its face.
Not what an assessment will ask about it. The examination blueprint follows the analysis. Publishing an item count now would mean inventing one and quietly changing it later.
Not that this description is finished. Version 0.9 is a draft and is expected to change materially before ratification. If you hold operational responsibility and think this domain is described wrongly, that is the input worth having.
The eight domains
Each governs a different part of how an operation is run. They are numbered for reference, not for importance.
Set the weight of this domain
The weighting is decided by operators rating the work, not by NBOP deciding what matters.
The analysis is open now. It takes about twenty minutes, because every task is rated twice, and the results are published in aggregate including the findings that contradict the current draft. If you have held operational responsibility, your rating counts toward the weight this domain ends up carrying.