Guide to "Core BPMN"

This is a short guide the the BPMN process-modelling notation.

Its not intended to cover all aspects of the language, just a small, practical sub-set, which we’ve called ‘Core BPMN’.

It is linked-to by the Model Expert model management and guidance tool, which implements this BPMN sub-set and provides real-time help to process modellers who are using the Sparx Enterprise Architect (EA) tool.

The subset also contains ideas from other kinds of models, because process modelling is not an isolated exercise – it needs to fit into a web of business knowledge from other areas.

Connecting your Process information

The Core BPMN approach lets you link information about your processes to other kinds of business knowledge:

• Most organizations will have an approved list of Stakeholders. These may be the official job-roles in the company, or be taken from the organization chart. Either way, showing how these people/roles link to processes can be used to show ownership or participation in a process
• Where process steps need software systems to help users, it’s useful to show which Use Cases they use on which software systems
• BPMN lets us show where Activities within processes share information. This shouldn’t create a new vocabulary, but use ideas from the conceptual model we have for our business
• Finally, in a running project there will always be outstanding issues which we are working on. So this lets of connect those issues to individual processes, so we can see where we have problems.

These are not the only integrations we might imagine, but we  intended this as an example of what is possible.