Process Modeling Purpose
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An important factor of how a BPMN model or generally spoken a process model would look like depends on the purpose for which the modeling is done.
I can think of mainly four purposes:
- Documentation
- Specification – i.e. modeling for later manual implementation
- Execution – i.e. modeling for executing the modeled process by a BPMN execution engine (Workflow)
- Model Driven Development – i.e. the model is used in an semi automated development process
Apparently most BPM models today are done for documentation.
With regards to documentation (only) projects I can mostly speak of my practical experience with bottom up documentation. This means, that I mostly do not go to a company and analyze the processes of the company and document them – although I did. Since I work in development, the generalized process knowledge is already coming through many channels into the development – and is in big parts already there for years – which is reflected in the code of the business software solutions, that we build. So the bottom up approach is documenting the processes which are already running in the software that has been developed.
I found in this that bottom up documentation is all about simplification. Because the software is so powerful with regards to the processes and all the special cases, for example cancellation and side paths of the process, modeling all of these variations with BPMN would result in very many detailed models, where one might lose the overview. So it is about setting priorities instead of documenting every detail.
Good priority may be the “sunny day” case – the good way forward of a business process – without special cases, interruptions, cancellations and the like. If it is a big software package, then this is already a lot of models.
