How to deal with the similar deliverable in my impact map?

Question

I'm tasting specification by example in my project e-Travel. It's a simple project about travel expenses reimbursement.

1. The flow is simple：

• Employee does business travel by assignment.
• When he returns, the employee posts a claim for the expenses paid and subsidies.
• Then the accountant verifies the claim, and calculates the expenses and subsidies.
• Finally, the cashier pays to the employee by the signed claim from chief.

2. We get out two business goals and draw two impact maps:

• Employee gets expenses in 5 days.
• No fraudulence or mistake happens.

3. Now, I'm not sure the deliverable for the cashier.

I think that the printing check or preparing fields by details of claim should also speed up the payment.

So, should I repeat them in the first map or create a link? Otherwise, the duplicate is not necessary?

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I know the question is so naive. But as a newbie, I need more guidance. Thank you!

Answer 1

There really doesn't need to be a separate goal for accuracy and fraud prevention since these should be handled by standard business policies and procedures. This goal and the associated tasks can be combined in the main flow based on documentation of prior approvals, policy compliance, and employee's supporting documentation.

(I've specified the intermediate times as "Day A-n" and so on since the intermediate processing times aren't clear and will be governed by factors not discussed here.)

Goal: Employee travel reimbursement in 5 days

Actors:

• employee
• accountant
• approving authority (supervisor/chief)
• cashier/disbursements

Impacts & Deliverables:

• employee
  • generate claim by day A1
  • pass claim to accounting by day A2
    • deliverable: signed claim with supporting documentation
• accountant
  • validate claim against prior approval where required by day B1
  • validate claim complies with policy by day B2
  • approves by day B3
  • pass claim to supervisor by day B4
    • deliverable: approved claim with attached documentation
• supervisor
  • reviews claim for reasonableness by day C1
  • approves by day C2
  • pass claim to cashier by C3
    • deliverable: check request
• cashier/disbursements
  • process payment by day D1
    • deliverables:
      • accounting journal
      • check
      • copy to file with appropriate retention

The impacts here are more in the form of "What," though their timely execution has impact in the sense an impact map would show on the end to end latency. To achieve a 5 day end to end process, there would have to be business policies about how long each stage could take along with contingencies. For example, if the supervisor was out of the office for two days, that could seriously affect the end to end time, if there wasn't a contingency provision.

Each company is different, but it's more usual that the employee's claim and supporting documentation would go to the supervisor before the accountant. The ordering doesn't affect the "Whats" and "Deliverables," though.