Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN)

  1 Day

Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is a standard for business process modelling that provides a graphical notation for specifying business processes in a Business Process Diagram based on a flowcharting technique. The objective of BPMN is to support business process management for both business users and IT specialists by providing a notation that is intuitive to business users yet able to represent complex process semantics. This course is aimed at providing business analysts and others involved in process management and improvement activities with sufficient understanding of the notation and the associated rules to allow them to produce Business Process Diagrams that conform to a widely recognised standard. The benefit to the participant’s organisation will be the in-house capability to create Business Process maps that can be shared and readily understood by all stakeholders, both within and external to the organisation.

Objectives:

On completion of the workshop, participants will be able to:

  • List reasons for adopting BPMN
  • Explain the three levels of BPMN use, descriptive, analytical and executable
  • Explain the similarities with and differences from standard flowcharting techniques
  • Recognise and explain the basic notation and how this can be used at the descriptive level to create Business Process Diagrams that describe when events and activities happen within a sequence
  • Apply their understanding of the basic notation to a work place example
  • Explain the use of BPMN at an analytical level and how the Business Process Diagrams created might be used in quantitative performance improvement projects.

Content:

  • Why BPMN?
  • BPMN - what it is and what it is not
  • The three levels of use
  • Similarities with flowcharting
  • A simple example
  • Descriptive level notation
    • Pool and lane
    • User and service tasks
    • Collapsed and expanded sub-processes
    • Start and end events
    • Exclusive and parallel gateways
    • Sequence and message flow
    • Data storage, data store and message
    • Text annotation
    • Link event pair
  •  Application to a case study
  •  Application to work place example
  • Analytical level concepts*
    • Using sub-processes
    • Different start and end events
    • Intermediate events 
    • Other branching and merging patterns
    • Exception handling
    • Repeating activities and pools
    • Transactions.

* This session is intended to provide participants with a more complete understanding of the scope of BPMN rather than to equip them with the skills to apply this knowledge to work place examples.