THE UCAM PROCESSES – AN INTRODUCTION

This section introduces the processes that form part of the UCAM. These processes show how and when the various UCAM elements are produced and used. The approach used here to describe the UCAM processes is known as the ‘seven views’ approach and makes use of a diagramming notation called the UML. As stated above, this book is not one on learning modelling and the reader is referred to Holt (2009) for a description of the seven views approach and the notation used.

The UCAM requirements

Before looking at the UCAM processes, it is worth, as in any endeavour, looking first at the specific requirements for UCAM and its processes. When considering requirements, we are really asking ourselves the fundamental question ‘why are we doing this in the first place?’ It is essential to know why we are interested in competency assessment, as different people’s needs may be different, hence their requirements may be different. These requirements are shown in Figure 4.1, where each ellipse on the diagram represents a requirement, or need.

The main UCAM requirement is to be able to ‘Assess competency’ which, if it is to be met, includes requirements to ‘Understand source framework’, ‘Populate framework’, Set-up assessment’ and ‘Carry out assessment’. In order to ‘Understand source framework’, then there are additional requirements that have to be met to be able to ‘Model source framework’ and to ‘Map source framework to generic framework’. Competency assessments are not carried out for their own sake (or, at least, should not be carried out for their own sake) and so the requirement to ‘Assess competency’ has a number of variants, showing the need to be able to ‘Assess competency for accreditation’, ‘Assess competency for education’, ‘Assess competency for recruitment’, ‘Assess competency for staff appraisal’ and ‘Assess competency for self-assessment’.

It is no coincidence that the four main areas of UCAM, as discussed in Chapter 3, were concerned with understanding any source frameworks to be used (the framework definition elements), populating the frameworks to be used with the information needed to enable them to be used (the framework population elements), determining the reason and scope for an assessment (the assessment set-up elements) and carrying out the assessment (the assessment elements). These four areas and, as will be seen below, the UCAM processes exist in order to meet the four main UCAM requirements that make up the requirement to ‘Assess competency’, that is, they exist to meet the requirements to ‘Understand source framework’, ‘Populate framework’, ‘Set-up assessment’ and ‘Carry out assessment’.

The UCAM stakeholders

Figure 4.1 also shows the stakeholders involved in UCAM. These are represented by the ‘stick person’ symbols on the diagram, with lines joining each stakeholder to the requirement with which they have an interest. But just what is meant by the term ‘stakeholder’? A stakeholder represents the role of anyone or anything that has a vested interest in a project, and can range from an end-user to shareholders in an organisation, to the government of a particular nation. For competency assessments, the important roles are those associated with the definition and carrying out of assessments.

The use of the word ‘role’ must be emphasised here, as the biggest mistake made by people when defining stakeholders is that they refer to stakeholders by individual names, such as the name of a person or an organisation. It is the roleof the person or organisation, rather than the actual name, which is of interest from the modelling point of view. For a full discussion of stakeholders, see Holt (2009) or Holt and Perry (2008).

In order to ensure consistency in the definition of the UCAM processes, the stakeholders can be brought together on a stakeholder view that identifies the stakeholders, groups them by type and can, if needed, be used to show any other relationships between the stakeholders. Such a diagram can be seen in Figure 4.2.

Figure 4.2 shows that there are three main types of ‘Stakeholder’: ‘Customer’, ‘External’ and ‘Supplier’. These are chosen as the highest-level stakeholders, as almost every project will have both a supplier and a customer and will normally have some external stakeholders such as standards or legislation.

The ‘Customer’ stakeholder represents those stakeholders that are the recipients of the service being provided, in this case recipients of an assessment. The ‘Customer’ roles may be influenced by the ‘Support’ roles in certain circumstances, but are typically considered as being separate. One specific role is shown:

• ‘Assessee’. This role is carried out by the person (or people) being assessed against a competency framework and, as such, who has an interest in the ‘Carry out assessment’ requirement.

The ‘External’ stakeholder represents stakeholders such as standards, legislation or external systems. An ‘External’ role is not usually influenced by either customer or supplier and represents standards, best-practice models or policing roles. One specific role is shown for the ‘External’ stakeholder role:

• ‘Source Framework’. This role represents any source frameworks against which assessments will be carried out and is therefore linked to the ‘Understand source framework’ requirement. Note that this stakeholder very much represents a ‘thing’, in this case a document, rather than a person or organisation. This is a perfectly valid, though often overlooked, use of stakeholders.

The ‘Supplier’ stakeholder represents those stakeholders who are involved in the supply of a service, in this case those stakeholders involved in carrying out an assessment. The ‘Supplier’ role has five specific roles shown:

• ‘Assessor’. This role is broken down into two specific assessor roles, those of ‘Primary Assessor’ and ‘Secondary Assessor’. These roles are typically carried out by the people (although in years to come, this role could be taken by a computer application), as discussed later in this chapter, responsible for conducting an assessment. The ‘Assessor’ role is therefore linked to the ‘Carry out assessment’ requirement.

• ‘Assessment Architect’. This role is carried out by the person (or people) responsible for the understanding of source frameworks and their mapping to the generic UCAM meta-model, as described by the ‘Understand source framework’ requirement.

• ‘Assessment Tailor’. This role is carried out by the person (or people) responsible for tailoring the source frameworks in order to establish the framework against which assessments will be conducted. The role is, therefore, linked to the ‘Populate framework’ requirement.

• ‘Assessment Definer’. This role represents the person (or people) responsible for establishing the needs for a particular set of assessments that are to be carried out. That is, for ensuring that the requirement to ‘set-up assessment’ is met.

• ‘Reviewer’. This role represents the person (or people) responsible for ensuring that the definition, set-up and carrying out of assessments is conducted correctly and as such has an interest in all of the UCAM requirements. This is shown by their link to the main ‘Assess competency’ requirement.

One of the reasons why we consider roles when discussing stakeholders, rather than names, is that the names may change, but the roles remain the same. Consider the situation where a self-assessment is being carried out by someone in a very small company. In such a situation, it may be possible that a single person takes on all roles in the customer and supplier categories. Imagine another situation where a large organisation intends to assess a thousand employees, then it is totally unfeasible for a single person to take on each role – especially the assessors. The exact responsibilities of these stakeholder roles, in terms of the activities to be carried out in the UCAM processes, will be discussed below when each of the UCAM processes is discussed.

The UCAM processes

In order to meet the requirements discussed above and to support the concepts described in Chapter 3, four UCAM processes and a number of supporting processes have been defined. These processes are shown in Figure 4.3.

Figure 4.3 shows that the four types of ‘UCAM Core Process’ are the ‘Framework Definition’ process, ‘Framework Population’ process, ‘Assessment Set-up’ process and ‘Assessment’ process. As discussed above, each of these processes is responsible for the production and utilisation of the UCAM elements relating to one area of the UCAM meta-model described in Chapter 3 and, hence, for fulfilling the main UCAM requirements introduced in ‘The UCAM requirements’ section above. Thus, for example, the ‘Framework Definition’ process is responsible for meeting the requirement to ‘Understand source framework’ and for the production and utilisation of the elements described in the ‘Framework Definition’ part of the UCAM meta-model.

Figure 4.3 also shows what has to be done in each process (the activities that have to be carried out, shown in the bottom compartment of each process) and what things are either produced by or consumed by each process (the artefactsthat flow into or out of the process, shown in the middle compartment). It does not attempt to show how each process is carried out. This description of process behaviour, together with a detailed discussion of each process, is contained in the four sections which follow.

Before a UCAM process is executed, it may be necessary to precede it with zero or more ‘Pre-assessment process(es)’. Similarly, a UCAM process may have to be followed by zero or more ‘Post-assessment process(es)’. These non-core UCAM support processes are discussed in ‘UCAM support processes’ below.