In the previous post I discussed how to use the Context Diagram for initial Event discovery. In this post I will present how to use the outputs from your Event List to discover more events.

The fifth column in your Event List (the one labeled “Which creates this…”) are the outputs of your business processes. You can use these outputs to discover more Events by asking the following questions for each output:

• Does the output go to a “Customer”? (an entity outside of the center bubble in the Context Diagram). If yes, then that is where the output ends. If no, then that means it must be input to another event or the output has no purpose. Ask your SME’s (Subject Matter Experts) what other business processes use this data. For each identified business process, you can flesh out the Event List row for that process.
• What are the “Create” Events for this output? These are the Events that result in the establishment of a new row (or rows) of data in the output in question. For example, the sale of a product creates a Sales Transaction record. Note there may be more than one Event that creates rows in this output.
• What are the “Change” Events for this output? For this you may need to examine each data element in the output. For each element, ask the SME’s what business processes change this data. Use these answers to continue to build the Event List.
• What are the “Delete” Events for this output? These are the Events that result in the logical or physical removal of a row in the output. For example, if the record retention requirement for the output is 5 years, then the time-based event “Record Retention Limit Reached” will be added to your Event List.

Now that you have added many more rows to your Event List, you will have more outputs to examine. Cycle back thru the Event List outputs and ask the same questions listed above. You will find your Event List grows very quickly!

In the next post I will continue to present additional techniques for Event Discovery.