Author: Bruce Silver
Publisher: Cody-Cassidy Press
Publication Date: October 2017
Pages: 124
Overview
While BPMN Method and Style, 2nd Edition continues to serve as the comprehensive BPMN reference, this new book is streamlined, focusing only on the essential elements that today’s process modelers want to focus on, and need to know. BPMN Quick and Easy provides that.
Drawing from the experience he acquired in delivering Method and Style training to thousands of professional clients, the author simplifies the BPMN vocabulary, methodology, and style rules with the same objective: helping readers create “Good BPMN” — models that clearly and fully communicate process logic through the printed diagrams—as streamlined and “mechanical” as possible.
The book follows the outline of the BPMN Method and Style training and is filled with numerous examples that illustrate common process scenarios. It omits the background and rarely used elements to expedite the learning process, making it quick and easy to create “Good BPMN.”
Key Learning Objectives
With this book, you will learn three key aspects of BPMN:
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BPMN Vocabulary: The shapes and symbols you need, with a focus on eliminating those you don’t.
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Method: A systematic five-step procedure for turning details from stakeholder workshops and interviews into well-structured BPMN digital asset that communicates clearly to all stakeholders, including other project teams, business, and IT.
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BPMN Style: Conventions designed to ensure the meaning of the process logic is clear from the printed diagrams alone, even to those unfamiliar with BPMN. These conventions are framed as additional rules that are validated in the Trisotech Workflow Modeler.
Topics include:
- What is BPMN?
- Differences from traditional flowcharts
- “Good BPMN”
- Activity and Process: BPMN’s hidden conceptual framework
- Gateways and end states
- Subprocesses and process levels
- Pools and message flows
- Only 3 ways a process can start
- Start events and the process instance
- Instance alignment and structural correctness
- The Method
- The essential style rules
- Parallel flow
- Timer events
- Message events
- Event gateway
- Error events
- Event subprocesses
- Iteration
Preface
In the six years since its publication, BPMN Method and Style, 2nd Edition has become the standard reference for process modelers using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard. Over these years, the Author, having delivered BPMN Method and Style training to over 4,000 students, has gained substantial insights into which parts of the standard are practically useful and which are best ignored. Where the previous book aimed to explain everything in the BPMN specification—with Method and Style layered on top—BPMN Quick and Easy streamlines this approach, focusing only on what process modelers truly need to know. As the saying goes, “I would have made it shorter if I had more time.” With six years of additional experience, this new work is more concise.
While other business process standards like BPEL have come and gone, and related ones like CMMN and DMN are yet to see mass adoption, BPMN has become pervasive and continues to be widely used, a notable feat fifteen years after its inception. Its primary audience remains business users, who traditionally resist adherence to any standards, making BPMN’s widespread acceptance all the more significant.
The main purpose of BPMN is to communicate process logic visually, through diagrams that facilitate collaborative, real-time sharing and discussion. However, this was not the main objective of the BPMN 2.0 task force at the Object Management Group (OMG) in 2009 when they drafted the specification. Their aim was to unify the diagramming notation of BPMN 1.2—which was already widely used by process modelers—with precise execution semantics, thus creating a visual programming language for process automation that could be utilized by both business and IT professionals. It is fair to say they succeeded, as process automation engines not based on BPMN have largely been abandoned.
Nevertheless, only a small fraction of BPMN models are actually used for process automation. Most process modelers are primarily concerned with documenting their current-state processes, analyzing them for improvement, or redesigning them for enhancement. Therefore, the execution-related details packed into the BPMN 2.0 specification are irrelevant to most users.
For the vast majority of BPMN users, the key aspect is the clarity of the diagrams. The process logic—how the process starts and ends, the sequence of its activities, and its external interactions—should be clearly understandable from the diagrams alone, not just to those familiar with the process. Furthermore, the logic captured in these diagrams should be both precise and complete. BPMN is intended for creating definitive models, not just sketches to supplement detailed text-based descriptions, which few read. In essence, the diagrams themselves constitute the complete process model.
Structure of the Book
The organization of the book largely follows that of the BPMN Method and Style training.
Chapter 1, What Is BPMN? discusses four key differences between BPMN and traditional swimlane flowcharts, which it outwardly resembles. It also explains the limitations of BPMN, the types of processes it cannot describe, and the aspects of process modeling that are outside its purview. It explains the real meaning of BPMN’s most fundamental concepts – activity and process – and the issues that arise when BPM Architecture and other segments of the BPM domain use those terms much more loosely.
Chapter 2, BPMN by Example. Builds up an order process bit by bit using elements of the Level 1 working set, mostly shapes carried over from traditional flowcharting. Readers learn the meaning and basic usage of tasks and subprocesses, start and end events, gateways, pools, and lanes, and message flow. At the same time, they learn the basics of Method and Style, including process levels and end states, with label matching between gateways in the parent level and end states in the child level. They learn the three possible ways a process can start, and how that tells you what the process instance represents.
Chapter 3, The Method. Deals with the real challenge of process modeling: translating the tangle of process details gathered from stakeholder interviews and workshops into properly structured BPMN that communicates the process logic clearly from the printed diagrams alone. The Method is a systematic five-step procedure. It is not done in real time with the stakeholders but involves carefully reorganizing that information afterwards in top-down fashion.
Chapter 4, BPMN Style. Explains why the rules of the BPMN spec are inadequate to ensuring Good BPMN and the benefits of formulating Good BPMN practices as additional style rules that can be validated by tools. It then explains the most important style rules, illustrating both violations and correct BPMN style.
Chapter 5, DMN and Decision Tasks. Discusses why embedding decision logic in process models as a chain of gateways is Bad BPMN, and how integrating BPMN with the new companion standard DMN fixes the problem. The chapter includes a tutorial on DMN basics and provides a simple procedure for transforming embedded decision logic into a decision task (aka business rule task) invoking a DMN decision, followed by a single gateway.
Chapter 6, Parallel Flow. Explains the concepts and issues of conditionally parallel flow using OR gateways, and use of the proper gateway to merge sequence flows, depending upon whether they are exclusive alternatives, unconditionally parallel, or conditionally parallel.
Chapter 7, Events. Discusses common usage patterns with the Big 3 event types: Timer, Message, and Error. Readers learn how to model deadline-triggered actions, wait for a message or a timeout, handle cancellation or update of a process in flight, and use error throw-catch patterns. The main focus is on intermediate events, but the chapter also describes the use of event subprocesses.
Chapter 8, Instance Alignment. Returns to an issue introduced in Chapter 1, the spec’s requirement that the instance of every activity in a BPMN process must correspond 1:1 with the process instance. That means, for example, that in a process where the instance is an order, every activity must be performed once per order, not once a day or once a batch of orders. Of course, batching is commonplace in real processes, and this chapter discusses various ways to handle it: loop and multi-instance activities, multi-process structures, and non-interrupting event subprocesses.
Chapter 9, Becoming Proficient. Discusses how to go beyond “book learning” and become really proficient at Good BPMN. It takes practice, testing your understanding, and hands-on experience with real tools. Training including certification is usually a big help.