Not a Process Yet

Following up the previous post - may we call a business processes things like “Oil Mining” or “New Product Promotion?”

Once again, the answer depends on the context. In BPMN they aren’t business processes, definitely. From BPMN perspective business process is a specific sequence of actions initiated by a specific event and ended by some specific result.

» read the rest

Everyone knows what a business process is. Yet it’s difficult to find two people agreeing on the term. Should they look in a book for the definition? But there are are dozens of different definitions.

We must face the fact that there is no universally-accepted definition of a business process and probably newer will be. Hence it’s no use to develop the true definition and I won’t do that. I’ll try instead to explain what do I mean by the term “business process”.

» read the rest

Sorry, this entry is only available in Русский.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Русский.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Русский.

This pattern is less common than e.g. «Internal Order» yet it’s used quite often - probably once per each two BPMN classes.

Examples:

• Purchase by Tender
• Competitive Hiring

Simplified diagram depicts the essence of the pattern: » read the rest

Sorry, this entry is only available in Русский.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Русский.

and it was a very good summer -

Tyrrhenian sea, Stromboli island and volcano (Italy).

Aegean sea, vicinity of Marmaris (Turkey).

Ionian sea, legendary Ithaca island (Greece).

My activities in BPMN got me a reputation of an expert in process modeling. Let it be so; yet I believe it’s rather the basics of the craft than its top and personally I’m more interested in issues arising at BPM and performance consulting intersection and business process BPMS implementation methodology. It’s a common story: the public is more attracted to what an expert considers almost trivial while what he treats as an achievement may come unnoticed. As an example, the most popular posts at this blog are those tagged “FAQ”.

ebizQ editor Piter Schooff recorded a podcast effectively presenting me as a «modeling guy». OK, if Peter believes modeling is a good topic right now then I’m not going to argue. The podcast is published at ebizQ: «Process discovery and modeling done right» (transcript).

Correcton: page 3 of the transcript reads -

PS: What are some best practices for effective process modeling?

AB: You might notice from my blog that I’m a proponent of process patterns. Pattern is a typical process fragment common to a number of real world processes. And the matching word for “pattern” is “recognition.” With an adequate training and some practice, a process analyst just sees familiar patterns in the process task he is working on. And this way, he or she gets the results much faster, [but] they’re more error-prone because they are based on proven fragments or patterns.

Of course I meant “less error-prone” here.

This was my second podcast at ebizQ. Prevoious podcast: «Avoiding BPM done wrong» (transcript).