The BPMN Graphic Handbook

By Esteban Herrera

- Do you want to know the purpose of all the diagrams and elements of BPMN in an easy way?
- Do you want a quick reference to the most useful parts of BPMN?
- Are you tired of reading books full of boring text (and in small font)?

 

The BPMN Graphic Handbook is the solution to these problems.

 

This book describes all the major BPMN diagram types, what they're used for, and the basic notation involved in creating them.

 

This is a brief book, but for a good reason. It contains only the more useful information to learn about BPMN.

 

BPMN doesn't have to be difficult. A bigger book will give you more detail, but it will also take longer to read and not all the information will be useful in the real life. This book will quickly get you up to speed on the essentials of the BPMN and it's also as handy reference to the most common parts of the notation.

 

This book doesn't cover the use of executable BPMN, a particular tool to make diagrams, how it relates to business process management or process automation. It main focus is just to teach the notation for high level analysis purposes.

 

So try a sample of the book or buy it and start learning now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Esteban Herrera
• Release date: May 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781513001623

Book preview

Chapter ONE

Introduction

What is a process and process modeling?

Let’s define these terms in simple words.

A process is the work someone (or something) do to accomplish an objective.

Process modeling means documenting the current state of a process to describe for example, how it starts, when it’s complete, and how a process get from A to B.

The importance of process modeling

How do you organize to get the work done?

Which are the steps?

Who should do them?

All organizations need to know the answers of these questions in order to UNDERSTAND how their business actually works and IMPROVE how things are done.

However, until processes are documented, it’s impossible to UNDERSTAND them, IMPROVE them, and CONTROL them.

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PROCESS MODELING SHOULD BE THE FIRST STEP TO UNDERSTAND AND BEST ORGANIZE THE WAY A BUSINESS WORKS.

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Models and communication

So models are a COMMUNICATION tool since they help an organization to understand its processes.

Process modeling might be an easy task in a small organization, but think about a large organization:

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An organization with thousands of employees.

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An organization spread across many locations around the world.

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An organization that has relationships and/or dependencies with many suppliers, partners and customers.

It can easily become a mess. Interpretations of the model are hardly the same because people no longer have the same context or the same cultural references, leaving the interpretation of the model to the reader.

Obviously, this is a problem. The elements used to describe business processes must COMMUNICATE the MEANING intended by the modeler.

And that’s where BPMN comes in.

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B USINESS

P ROCESS

M ODELING

N OTATION

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What is BPMN?

The Business Process Modeling Notation provides a STANDARD way of representing business processes.

This is done by specifying the sequence of activities that make up the process and its relating information in basically two levels of detail:

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Simple

Diagrams with activities, some decisions and important events. If needed, more information can be added, like more specific types of activities and events, roles, etc.

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Executable

Diagrams that contain sufficient detail and information that enables the execution of the model by software (Business Process Management Suites).

In some environments, having very detailed models with precise instructions of how the work should happen, allows to use them to drive the work itself by importing them in tools that can execute those instructions. 

However, the focus of this book is to show how the Business Process Modeling Notation is used for representing business processes for high-level analysis purposes.

TimelineBPMN

History of BPMN

In August 2001, 35 organizations formed the BPMI (Business Process Management Institute) Notation Working Group and BPMI.org. Their objective was to create a single notation for process modeling, since at that time, there were many notations and tools for that purpose. They published the first version

Reviews for The BPMN Graphic Handbook

[mauricio · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

gateway part is very clear and explain the whole diagrams with a good examples.

[Darren Lee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am by no means new to process mapping or diagramming, but new to BPMN. I had referred to some materials before reading this book and have found it very helpful and not too heavy leaving me comfortable to go on and finding out gaps on my own. For this, it gets four stars. A fifth star would have been awarded if the book had been better proof read prior to publishing. Had quite a few grammatical errors - more towards the end it felt which could lead to feel the book had been a bit rushed. However, even with that that been said, I still recommend it as a worthwhile short guide to get you up and running as it achieves this admirably.