I want to shortly explain the context of my approach to Business Process and Choreography Modeling Coaching. My guiding philosophy is a full cycle coaching approach. That means, that not only the creation of choreography models is the goal, but the role of them within the context of the preceding and succeeding steps. I intend to explain this in more detail in Webinars and Seminars in the future.

Model Business Process

First of all the Business Process itself is modeled. The focus of this activity is to identify the steps that need to be performed to reach the goal and their dependency. This is done irrespective of the participants, which are not completely clear at this point in time.

Break into Participants

This is a design decision. Often Participants are companies of the business world. Still it is a design decision how fine or coarse granular they are designed and which part of the process is executed in which participant. For example it is possible to define different departments within a company as one or many participants.

Model Choreography

Now the interaction between participants can be modeled by means of the choreography model. This is a top-down approach. Therefore it defines the frame of subsequent detailed process modeling within the participants.

Model Public Processes / Services of Participants

As a next step the public processes and services of the participants can be modeled. It is decisive to model which services which participant exposes and which constraints exist between the service operations (e.g. an order needs to be confirmed, before it can be delivered).

If a complete system is designed from scratch, the public process models and the services are designed as To-Be processes and services. But in most instances the participants will at least in part already exist. Therefore As-Is models will be created and must be aligned with the To-Be model. This is the most challenging part of all. Because if the public process of a participant cannot be freely designed, because the cost to change it is too high, then the choreography must be changed, which in turn means, that the other participant may need to change. This is the most challenging negotiation in the design process.

Derive Business Objects

Before an implementation can start, Business Objects, which implement the behavior of the participants, need to be derived. The behavior of the Business Objects needs to be made consistent with the public behavior of the participant.

In the end the public behavior of the participant will be an abstract process, while the business objects will be concrete. This will also be very clear, when it is time to model correlation rules – i.e. which message instance is processed by which process instance. At this point in time, the most natural process instance will be the business object instance. Remember: The public process is only an abstract process – therefore it does not have instances.

Model Common Monitoring Process

Now the details have been modeled and we want to re-aggregate the execution of the processes into a common process view on instance level. The Monitoring Process View is needed as a re-simplification of the already modeled details. In the optimal case the monitoring process is equal to the original process model which stood at the beginning. Most probably there will be deviations for good reasons. This of course is also a good exercise to re-confirm the original requirements and justify the deviations from it.

This is my BPMN 2.0 Overview Map.

It shows a Choreography model in the middle, Orchestration with public Processes and private Processes, that belong to the public Processes.

Systems integration is the realization of the underlying business processes. This sounds so simple. But in reality there is often a misalignment between the business process design and the systems design. It is the wrong way to just implement business processes, that are as they are today or that are designed without discretion of the principles of loose coupling.

Often system designers need knowledge about how business processes work, but on the other hand business process designers need knowledge about how system integration works. As long as both sides are willing to learn and willing to share the knowledge, it is possible to come up with common principles of modeling, that avoid the most common mistakes, that lead to project cost overrun or failure.  I say it clearly what I mean: using BPMN 2.0 choreography modeling language in itself is no gurantee for success. But: It is a VERY useful tool for the communication between the business and system experts, which is a necessary condition of success.

So in other words, it is necessary, that the process design follows the principles of loose coupling of business processes. That is no design task, that can be solved by system designers alone, if the business process is modeled in a tightly coupled way. In other words: If the business process is designed in the right way – in the loosely coupled way – then the system design is without a hitch. If the business process is designed in the wrong way – there is no way to save the project on the system design level.

So are business experts forced to design business processes different, just to make the job of system designers easier? No. If it is designed that way, it is a better business process. It would work even better even if there was no system, but just paper and phone. It is more tolerant to errors. It gives the individual more freedom to decide. It makes it easier to reach the goal. Yes, it requires a little bit more brain power than just modeling the sunny day case. But in the end it pays off abundantly.

And in my eyes this is good news. It is NOT the system programming that dominates the design and dictates the constraints. It can be the business process needs again, that prescribe the way to go. And that is why BPMN 2.0 is so helpful, because it starts with the business process model.

At the Workflow Management Coalition BPMN Industry Day we also discussed about the implications, that BPMN 2.0 now has a meta model. In itself this is a very good thing. However some problems appear, when thinking about backward compatibility, especially with XPDL as de-facto standard for model exchange. If there are models, which are incomplete, but they still need to be exchanged, how can this be handled, if the BPMN 2.0 metamodel requires strict cardinality conformity, that was not required by XPDL? The same problem appears in tools in general, if the model is in an incomplete state and it is saved. Tools need to react gracefully to this situation, otherwise the usability of the tool is harmed.

So if in this example the incomplete model is validated against the meta model, then it fails, because the meta model requires at least two participants for the conversation node. However it makes completely sense to have the cardinality 2..* in the metamodel, because there is no meaningful Conversation without at least two participants. A possible solution would be to water down the metamodel. This is not discussed for BPMN 2.0, but may be for XPDL.

So in this watered down metamodel the participants cardinality is only *, allowing for 0 participants as well. The validadion succeeds, but the semantic suffers. Furthermore the check has to be done whatsoever at some stage. So watering down the metamodel is not a good idea in my view. Instead the solution should be a model lifecycle.

In this proposal the model itself has a lifecycle, which can be active or inactive. If the model is inactive, the validation reacts gracefully against the metamodel. Only if the model is active, the validation fails, but this is indeed intended. So it is unter the control of the modeler, if he wants the full strength of the validation or not.

Such a model lifecycle is not planned in BPMN 2.0 as far as I know, but I think it is a good idea and should be considered. There is a MOF 2.0 Facility and Object Lifecycle Specification that might be considered to be used in order not to invent something new that exists already.