BPM Guide has some examples of BPMN 2.0 diagrams, on the heels of Stephen White's blog post that the BPMN 2.0 spec has been ratified by OMG. Thanks to Jakob Freund for publishing them. There are a couple of key points that Jakob makes throughout the article, that I'd like to call attention to:
Creating process models for both business AND it is actually one of the absolutely main topics of our consulting business. And it is a very big struggle, of course. For us it was important to show in the document that BPMN is not necessarily too complicated for business, because it totally depends on how you actually use the standard when process modeling. That? 's why we always need a Framework around BPMN if we want to apply it in bigger modeling engagements.
This is a well-said point - BPMN doesn't have to be too complicated for the business. But drawing diagrams that are not more complicated than they have to be takes some skill and practice. I often tell people who aren't familiar with BPM that it takes a reasonable degree of abstract thinking to really do well. It is the abstractions and generalizations afforded by a process and its subprocesses that comprise the solution.
Apparently they built these examples with Trisotech's tools:
The diagrams in the examples document however are all made with Trisotech's Visio-based BPMN Modeler, provided for this purpose by Denis Gagn. The cool thing is that we could directly serialize the diagrams into BPMN 2.0 XML with that tool.
Denis, where is this tool! Sounds interesting!
Jakob also gives interesting examples of how to take advantage of collaboration diagrams. His final thoughts:
- Make a "strategic" process diagram (Figure 6.1), just a simple sketch for a quick understanding.
- Make an "operational" process diagram (Figure 6.2) for analyzing the collaborational aspects.
- Enrich the diagram with the aspects of a process engine, therefore adding a pool for the process engine.
- Take that process engine pool into your technical environment and enrich it for execution (make a "technical" process diagram).
Good advice for how to approach modeling in BPMN.