Much has been written about business process analysis.  There are articles about Use Cases, Sequence Diagrams, and more.  It's my opinion that most small businesses can avoid this level of complexity when they're trying to understand their business processes, and can instead focus on understanding the roles and responsibilities of people as a start.

One tool that I like to use is a high level diagram that correlates responsibilities with individual people (or small teams), and can then be used to deconstruct the responsibilities to tasks and process flows.  I call it a responsibility diagram.  If you work in a small business, you likely have many jobs to do-- understanding these jobs is a great place to begin.  Here's an example from a small business that sells sewing project kits online:

Admittedly, this is a bit of a hybrid of several UML diagrams, but what it's really designed to do is get a small business owner (decision maker) thinking about the high level processes and lead them into decomposing them into more manageable workflows.  Once we've got this diagram, we can rename the person to a role, in this case, a suitable role name might be "Order Taker".  This will help to separate the tasks from a person, and may make it easier to identify responsibilities that should more naturally fall on other people.  In this example, why wouldn't the Inventory Adjustment be done by Kelly.

I call the rectangular box the responsibility boundary, and once the responsibility changes, the flow would be illustrated in another box.  Similarities to Use Case Diagrams and Sequence Diagrams are obvious to the initiated, but to the business owner, it's still a simple diagram that portrays the work their people do in an easy to understand way.

In Part 3, we'll talk about what happens when a responsibility crosses boundaries to another role.