Sub
A process is not one unbroken flow. Where it is large enough, it is made of parts, coherent chunks of work, each doing a piece of what the process delivers, joined into the whole. Those parts are its sub-processes, and this volume is about them: what a sub-process is, when a process needs them, where each sits in the whole, and what each does for it. A core deepened to its backbone shows these parts; here we treat them in their own right, the pieces a process is built from.
A sub-process is a part, not a separate process the core reaches out to. It is a chunk of the process's own flow, large enough to be worth naming and treating as a unit, small enough to be one coherent piece. A simple process needs none; its flow is made directly of steps. A larger one is made of sub-processes, each itself made of steps, or of smaller sub-processes again, down to the step. So this volume teaches the parts: when to break a process into sub-processes and when to leave it as steps, how to divide it so each part is coherent, where each part sits, and how the parts combine back into the whole they serve.
Think Simple.
Roles
Owner
Owns the end to end of their area. The decision rights and the full responsibility are theirs, at any level, in any place.
Leader
Leads, and can design a part, but does not own the end to end. (If they did, we would call them the Owner.)
Designer
Designs the part in focus, an Owner across their area, or a Leader within their part. Designing is what owning and leading ask of you.
Stakeholder
Holds a stake in the process.
Challenger
Challenges, and brings something to work with. The point may be right. Engage it.
Performer
Performs the steps.
Refuser
Refuses, and brings nothing to work with, at any level. Look first for a root. If there is none, the way past is above them.
The Example
This volume returns to the same company you met in the Rules, and the same core you built in the Core: the software subscription, delivered by subscribe, activate, deliver, verify. The case is the same; only the lens has turned. There you shaped the core whole, down to its backbone. Here you look inside that backbone, at the parts it is made of.
For the core is not one undivided flow. When it was deepened, in the Core, each of its four beats opened into its own main parts: activate became settle the payment, open the account, record the entitlement; deliver became make the software available, and see it downloaded, installed, and logged into; verify became check the subscription's standing, and hold the software back where it has lapsed. Those main parts are the core's sub-processes, the chunks the backbone is built from. Each is a coherent piece of the core's work, large enough to be named and handled as a unit, and each is, in its own small way, a process: it has a beginning and an end, a flow of its own, and a job it does for the whole.
Take activation. It is not a single step but a sub-process: a payment must be settled, and only if it settles does an account open, and only once the account is open is the entitlement recorded that lets the software run. Three pieces, in order, each depending on the one before, together doing one coherent thing, bringing a subscription to life. That is what makes activation a sub-process and not a step: it is a small flow in its own right, a part of the core large enough to be worth treating as a whole. The same is true of delivery, and of verification. The core is built of these parts.
Not every part is a sub-process. Some pieces of the core are small enough to be single steps, done and passed on, with no inner flow to speak of. Recording the entitlement, inside activation, may be one such step. So the core is a nest of the two: sub-processes where a piece is large enough to be its own flow, steps where a piece is small enough to stand alone. Knowing which is which, where to draw a sub-process and where a step suffices, is part of what this volume teaches, because a core cut into the wrong parts is as hard to build and run as one never divided at all.
This is also where a part can become a core of its own. Activation, seen from inside the subscription core, is a sub-process, a part of a larger flow. But seen on its own, by whoever owns and designs it, it is a small core in its own right, with its own direction, its own backbone, its own edges. A sub-process at one frame is a core at another, the same relativity you met when a department's core turned out to be, from the company's frame, a sub of the company's core. So the parts the core is made of are not lesser things; they are processes, nested, each a whole at its own frame and a part at the frame above.
That is the case, seen through the sub lens. One core, the software subscription, taken apart into the pieces it is made of: the sub-processes that are small flows in their own right, the steps that are single acts, and the judgment of which a piece should be. Read it, as before, as a story first. The chapters that follow take this one core and look inside it, so that what a sub-process is, when a core needs one, where each part sits, and what each does for the whole, can be seen at work in something real.
Sub is built on the Core. Where that volume shaped the whole core process down to its backbone, this one looks inside that backbone, at the parts the core is made of. It shows what a sub-process is, a coherent chunk of a process's own flow, large enough to be worth naming and treating as a unit; when a core needs them and when its pieces are better left as steps; how to divide a process so each part is whole; where each part sits; and how the parts combine back into the core they serve. Each discipline builds on the one before, from the first cut of a process into its parts to the sound set of sub-processes that make a core whole.
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Think Simple.
