Process mining for project management

Abstract

Business process mining or process mining is the intersection between data mining and business process modelling that extracts business patterns from event logs. Event logs are freely available in any organization. Business logs are a potential source of useful information. By the various patterns that are present in the logs, a lot can be estimated about the type of procedures that should be incorporated into the organization for better performance. Event logs store information about time and event data of business processes. Process mining algorithms are used to mine business process models using event logs. Generating automated business models out of this could provide valuable insight to a firm eventually leading to customer satisfaction. Process Mining works by three phases: discovery, conformation and alteration. By using process mining, many kinds of information can be collected about the process, such as control-flow, performance, organizational information and decision patterns. A process model could be represented as Petri nets which is a formal graphical representation of the workflow diagram or it can be represented as Business Process Modelling Notation. This project aims to develop a user friendly platform which is capable of generating petri net like models by process mining. By using various process mining algorithms we will develop software which would mine the event logs of a particular firm. It would provide a data or workflow analysis scheme. This would optimize business process intelligence and thus provide alternative and superior work strategies. In this project, we are mainly targeting project management using process mining. There are many projects that are undertaken by an IT company that all follow the same procedure. The concept of business process mining can be used in order to improve the performance of a company by optimizing its Software Development Life Cycle. By feeding the previous logs of a similar project of the company, the software would give a flowgraph. This flowgraph can help to identify the sequence of the activities, roles in the organization as well as various efficiency parameters. The algorithm being used is the Heuristic Miner Algorithm for process mining.