Chapter 6. BPMN and Process Mapping

One of the most important elements of every Business Analyst’s toolkit is process modeling, which is also significant activity for Business Process Management professionals.  Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a method of illustrating business processes in the form of a diagram similar to a flowchart as shown in the Diagram below:

BPMN was originally conceived and developed by the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI). It is currently maintained by the Object Management Group (OMG).

BPMN provides an intuitive and easy way for non-expert users in BPM to understand the notation. With BPMN both the business and technical sides of the organization can share a common language – something that they can both understand and that meets their respective needs for precision and flexibility. This shared language is empowering new ways of working together – and it results in the deployment of new and more flexible applications. Thus, BPMN reduces noise communication between the process design stage and implementation, execution and management.

When to Use BPMN

There are a variety of scenarios when a business analyst should use a business process model, below listed just a few examples:

1. Work with business stakeholders to understand or describe how they do their job
   • they are such an easy model for business stakeholders to create and understand.
2. Show the sequence of when things happen
   • many models show relationships between pieces of information, but process flows are the best way to show the order that things need to occur.
3. Show the current state (as-is) and future state (to-be) of the business process
   • this would be impossible to do well in words, so we suggest you create the as-is, then update it in a new copy for the to-be flow.
4. Show the order in which systems interactions occur
   • this is a variant of a business process called a system flow, where the swimlanes are actually systems instead of people and the steps are steps within systems.