I've been thinking for a while about how to further enhance my BPMN Method and Style training. Even though we spend a LOT of time in class on exercises using a BPMN tool, either itp commerce or Signavio, students really need more practice to learn the material. To double the number of exercises would add a full day to the course, not economically justifiable. Also, there is a huge difference in the speed of completing exercises from one student to the next.
Process innovation was a central theme of last week's IBM Impact conference - it took center stage in the Day 2 Main Tent - but the term BPM has seemingly been banished at IBM, replaced by "Smarter Process". Now BPM is just the name of one product in the larger Smarter Process marketecture, shown below. The Smarter Process "suite" is the white block in the middle, where BPM, together with Operational Decision Manager and Case Manager, are being extended to integrate with mobile, social, cloud, and big data, as well as with each other.
Together with Shelley Sweet of I4Process, I began doing a set of basic Process Mapping 101 training videos for Lombardi Blueprint several years back, and have updated it every couple years for IBM Blueworks Live. The latest iteration is now online, available for free whether or not you are a Blueworks Live user. In addition to the basics of how to get started in BPM - how to organize the project, staff the team, create the first high level map, and communicate with the sponsor - the latest version shows off more of the advanced capabilities of the tool, including modeling policies and decisions, and Blueworks Live's extensive collaboration features.
Once I had bpmnPRO, my new gamified eLearning app, done in Storyline, I figured integrating it with my Wordpress website would be easy, since Wordpress has a plugin for just about everything. But I had no idea what I was in for... I knew I needed the following: A way for users to try out bpmnPRO for free A way to allow users to self-register for full access with a credit card A way to secure it so that only registered users could access it A discussion forum available to registered users A way to track user completion progress and scores.
Perhaps the greatest failing of the BPMN 2.0 spec is the inadequate explanation of its most fundamental concept: process. That failure lies at the root of so much confusion and modeler error. A process in BPMN has four distinct aspects: as an "orchestration", as a collaboration "participant", as a container of activity performers, and as an actor in its own right. It is all of these things at once. As an orchestration.
Message is another fundamental BPMN concept that is not well explained in the spec. Section 8.3.11 defines a message as "the content of a communication between two Participants [in a collaboration]". As explained last time, "Participants" here means the process on one end and some entity external to the process on the other end. The message is just the content of the communication, i.e. the information communicated. The communication itself is a message flow, a dashed connector in the diagram.
In my recent post about what is a message, I omitted one important aspect: the addressee. Unlike its close cousin signal, a message definitely has one! But once again, the BPMN spec does not explain what the addressee of a message means. The closest it gets is to say that the target of a message flow may only be an activity, Message event, or participant (black-box pool). But this utterly fails to explain exactly who or what is the intended recipient of the message.
We still have space available in our upcoming BPMessentials BPMN Method and Style live-online class December 3-5 from 11am-4pm ET/5pm-10pm CET each day. As a bonus, students will get free use of my new bpmnPRO eLearning app, perfect preparation for our certification exam. The training includes 60-day use of Process Modeler for Visio, an addin to Visio 2007/2010/2013 supporting Method and Style validation and many other great features. It also includes post-class certification that demonstrates mastery of the course material.
I received an email today from a reader asking: "If you have multiple call activities that occur within a process pool, is there any reason you can't create another pool for Call Activities and use that to group the call activities / processes, other than the fact that a sequence flow connection cannot be used?" Again, I think this goes back to the issue of what is a process in BPMN.
Join me and Gero Decker of Signavio on January 30 for a webcast on how to maximize the value of your BPM investment with a well-prepared team. Many people mistakenly think the "expensive" part of BPM is the software technology. It's not. The expensive part is the hundreds of man-hours spent in information-gathering, modeling, analysis, and redesign. All those SME meetings and workshops, process map revisions, and document reviews! Yes, it can be a lot.