A Level 1 Activity might be “Develop new product”. If we view this activity as a process we can conceive of a series of activities that together produce a new product design. These we will call Level 2 Activities.

A Level 2 Activity might be “Plan new product development” If we view this activity as a process we can conceive of a further series of activities that together produce a new product development plan. These we will call Level 3 Activities.

A Level 3 Activity might be “Verify new product development plan” If we view this activity as a process we can conceive of a further series of activities that together produce a record of new product development plan verification. These we will call Level 4 Activities.

A Level 4 Activity might be “Select verification record blank” Now if we were to go any further in the hierarchy we would be in danger of noting arm movements. Therefore in this example we have reached the limit of activities at Level 4.

In some processes we might decompose to 7 or 8 levels before we reach this limit. In such cases the hierarchy in Article 2  would be inadequate and so we could use the convention of:

• Business process (Level 1)                 E.g. Demand Creation
  • Level 2 process                         E.g. Develop New Product/Service
    • Level 3 process                E.g. Plan Project
      • Level 4 process        E.g. Prepare Project Plan
        • Activity            E.g. Develop Gantt Chart
          • Task       E.g. Determine project milestones

Another convention might be to simply categorise the levels as Process, sub-process, sub-sub-process, sub-sub-sub-process etc but it might create some confusion in conversations.

For more information see Quality Management Essentials