11.2. Organizational Positions and Resource Pools

Since a business process happens in the context of an organization, it is natural to consider the concept of organizational positions, which has been introduced in Section 10.4.

Resource roles (including performer roles), resource types (including performer types), organizational positions and resource pools are defined in an OE class model. A resource role of an activity type is a special type of property having a resource type as its range.

A performer role of an activity type has a performer type as its range. For instance, in the following OE class model, the (implicitly named) performer role orderTaker of the activity type TakeOrder has the performer type OrderTaker as its range. Likewise the object type PizzaMaker is a performer type. A performer type may be an organizational position. For instance, in the following OE class model, both OrderTaker and PizzaMaker are organizational positions, for which an organization hires a number of human resources, forming corresponding resource pools (called orderTakers and pizzaMakers). These resource pools correspond to the direct populations of the two organizational positions.

An organizational position may subsume more than one performer role. In the model above, the organizational position PizzaMaker is an alternative resource subtype of the organizational position OrderTaker, as indicated by the generalization arrow with the category keyword «ar» (a UML "stereotype").

When a resource pool represents an organizational position charged with playing n performer roles, it is used by all n corresponding activity types.

It is an option that the resources of an alternate resource pool, corresponding to an alternative resource subtype, are associated with a lower proficiency level increasing both the duration of activities and their rework probabilities.