Slides from a webinar that I presented on June 9, 2010, as part of the Active Endpoints BPM Summer Camp series.

1. How to Explain BPMN to Business Users Sandy Kemsley www.column2.com sandy@kemsleydesign.com @skemsley

2. DON’T PANIC Replay and slides will be available

3. Agenda What’s all this BPMN stuff anyway? How much do we really need to know? What advanced bits might come in handy?

4. Recap from February: BPMN Is Simple... Activity Gateway Event Data

5. Source: http://bpmb.de/poster

6. The BPMN 2.0 Problem More than 100 elements Unlikely to be fully understood by most experts, much less users Unlikely to be fully supported by most vendors Has led to rejection of BPMN in favor of “simpler” modeling paradigms

7. The BPMN 2.0 Solution Not everyone needs to learn everything Group BPMN elements into sets used by different personas Business user Business analyst Architect/developer Each level adds more detail to model

8. COMPLETE Plus 50 elements DODAF Plus 29 elements DESCRIPTIVE Pool Lane messageFlow userTask serviceTask Re-Usable subProcess dataObject dataInput dataOutput textAnnotation Association dataAssociation dataStore messageStartEvent messageEndEvent timerStartEvent terminateEndEvent SIMPLE sequenceFlow Task (none) subProcess(embed) exclusiveGateway parallelGateway startEvent (none) endEvent (none) BPMN 2.0 Subclasses:Early Version Source: Workflow Management Coalition’s “Update on BPMN Release 2.0”

9. BPMN 2.0 Subclasses: Recent Version Descriptive Visible elements for high-level models Used by business analysts Analytic All of Descriptive plus elements for DoDAF enterprise architecture models Commonexecutable All of analytic plus elements for executable models

10. Descriptive Subclass participant (pool) laneSet sequenceFlow (unconditional) messageFlow exclusiveGateway parallelGateway task (None) userTask serviceTask subProcess (expanded) subProcess (collapsed) callActivity dataObject textAnnotation association/dataAssociation dataStoreReference startEvent (None) endEvent (None) messageStartEvent messageEndEvent timerStartEvent terminateEndEvent documentation group

11. Source: Workflow Management Coalition’s “Update on BPMN Release 2.0” Pool Message Flow Data Object Sub Process (Collapsed) User Task Lane Message Start Event Message End Event Data Association Call Activity (Collapsed) Service Task Text Annotation Association Descriptive Subclass Example

12. Data Store Source: Workflow Management Coalition’s “Update on BPMN Release 2.0” Descriptive Subclass Example

13. Analytic Subclass sequenceFlow (conditional) sequenceFlow (default) sendTask receiveTask Looping Activity MultiInstance Activity exclusiveGateway inclusiveGateway eventBasedGateway signalStartEvent signalEndEvent errorEndEvent message Plus: Intermediate events

14. Analytic Subclass: Intermediate Events Catching message Throwing message Boundary message Non-interrupting Boundary message Catching timer Boundary timer Non-interrupting Boundary timer Boundary error Non-interrupting Boundary escalation Throwing escalation escalationEndEvent Catching signal Throwing signal Boundary signal Non-interrupting Boundary signal condtionalStartEvent Catching conditional Boundary conditional Non-interrupting Boundary conditional

15. The Analyst’s Dilemma Descriptive is a manageable subset Analytic is too much, except for serious process experts Some of the event concepts in analytic subset are required for analysis and modeling

16. Oh Yeah... ...we left the business users out

17. What Do Business Users Really Need? Smaller subset of elements (?) Depends on user skills/aptitude Comprehension of BPMN without necessarily being able to model: Work with analysts to capture processes Review and approve models, with a cheat sheet or generous annotation

18. And back to Alex… Sandy Kemsley www.column2.com sandy@kemsleydesign.com @skemsley