Towards Process Improvement for Case Management

There are a number of methods for business process improvement that are used in practice and investigated in theory, such as Lean or Six Sigma. Most of these methods are activity based and they are aimed at optimizing the activities flow, and/or the usage of resources in the process. These methods suit well the workflow-based processes and thinking, but they are not easily adaptable to Case/Adaptive Case Management (CM/ACM) processes, the goal of improvement for which is improving the overall result from the knowledge workers cooperative work. Another distinctive feature of CM/ACM is that the process is guided not through which flow of activities to use in certain situations, but through a set of templates to use in these situations. This paper outlines a possible method of improving CM/ACM processes based on the Viable System Model (VSM). Though the usage of VSM for process improvement has been reported in the literature, it was not specifically applied to CM/ACM processes. The outline is based on the analysis of the process of organizing a series of scientific events, such as the AdaptiveCM workshop.