Honestly, I don’t remember. Maybe someone else can chime in?

I haven’t been working in BPMN land for quite a while, and the spec and best practices have moved forward without me :). If I do get back into things, and catch up with 2.0, I will definitely do some updates. At the time I was writing these, Phil Silver, IIRC, commented on a few of them, and had several insights and good points. I would suggest looking to see what content he has available – no idea if he has created a stencil or not.

I suspect there may also be some good tools that provide free-to-draw capabilities. At the time I was doing these, Lombardi was launching Blueprint, which may also work.

If you find good solutions, please share them here for other folks that come along.

Thanks again!

Phil

Thanks for pointing readers towards Accuprocess Modeler. I haven’t used it personally, but did look at the first versions of Blueprint from Lombardi (now an IBM company). Probably also worth checking out, as well.

While I agree with you that the mechanics of representing processes with any particular grammar or syntax can be difficult, I believe that developing an understanding of the right processes to create (and discovering the greatest opportunities to improve existing processes) is much more difficult, and very few people do it well.

By analogy, the hard part of writing a novel is not understanding how to form story-arcs, how to manipulate the mechanics of dramatic tension, or how to syntactically develop dialog. The hard part of writing a novel is creating an engaging story that captures the imagination of your audience.

In reality, a successful novel needs a compelling story, effectively told. Managing and improving processes requires both understanding and effective communication.

Thanks again!

I believe the key issue or challenge with process modeling is the unfamiliarity of most business users and even analysts with how to do this and also the lack of availability of easy-to-use tools that are better than just using Visio or PowerPoint.

Our team has been using the AccuProcess Modeler in the recent months and have found this to be a great tool which anyone can use without a lot of formal training. It includes process modeling, documentation and even process simulation for the as-is and to-be processes. It is available at: http://www.accuprocess.com

Thanks.

Sorry – I’m not familiar with the Catalyst approach – maybe someone else here is?

Unfortunately, I don’t have any experience with the Rummler Brache approach, so can’t give an experienced-based opinion. I also searched the web for tutorials or examples of RB diagrams – but couldn’t find any (not that there are many BPMN examples either).

Does RB allow for the looping constructs and more expressive decisions (gateways) that BPMN supports? The only RB diagram I saw looked like a simple flowchart that had been mapped into swimlanes.

I must have missed the BPM bus. I’ve always used the Rummer Brache notation which is supported in Visio and comes along with their book on “managing the white space in the organizaiton.”

From your experience, what’s the significant difference (if any) in BPM and Rummler Brache for process modeling?

I’ve recently talked to both a BPM vendor and a Business Process Analyst. What really struck me in the conversation is that they deal in at a much higher process level. From this and some papers from Gartner, I’ve learned very little of BPM ends up at the level of a traditional use case.