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Pragmatic BPMN

People focussing on a central point

This introductory, practical, hands-on course is designed to arm practitioners with useful and pragmatic structural knowledge of Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 2.0.  It is designed to enable delegates to build on their existing process modelling knowledge, and understand how BPMN can be used to usefully represent business processes.  The course focusses on combining theory with practise, to create an environment where attendees gain knowledge and experience that is directly relevant within their day-to-day practice. Each section of the course includes relevant exercises, brainstorms and/or break-out sessions to enhance the learning.   As well as the notation itself, the course also discusses how to use BPMN as a communication device with other stakeholders, along with how to build stakeholders ‘buy-in’ to process modelling work.

Course Duration: 2 days

Learning Outcomes

Attendees that successfully complete the course will be able to:

  • Understand core elements of BPMN, how and why these are used, and how to apply these in their work as a practitioner
  • Create collaboration diagrams comprising an appropriate range of BPMN elements
  • Understand, conceptually, what conversation and choreography diagrams are and how they fit within BPMN
  • Communicate the benefits of using BPMN to colleagues and stakeholders

Course Content

The course covers a range of topics, and can be tailored to meet your team’s specific needs.  The topics covered are:

Introducing BPMN

  • What is a ‘process’?
  • Benefits of a standard modelling notation, benefits of using BPMN
  • Brief introduction to BPMN structure (“elements”)

Introducing Collaboration Diagrams
An introduction to a number of key BPMN concepts that are useful when creating collaboration diagrams.    This section is driven by exercises and a case-study, allowing knowledge to evolve and build as the theory is introduced.   Attendees are encouraged to ask questions and consider how these elements would apply in their own practice too.

  • Start & Events: Start Events (None, Timer, Message), End Events (None, Terminate)
  • Activities: Task , Sub-processes
  • Lanes & Pools:  ‘White Box’ pools, Lanes,  ‘Black Box’ pools
  • Gateways: Exclusive, Parallel
  • Intermediate & Boundary Events:  Intermediate Events (Timer, Message), Boundary Events (Timer, Message)
  • Flow Objects: Sequence Flow, Message Flow

Approach to creating Collaboration Diagrams (“As Is” models)
This session is designed to discuss how to approach using BPMN collaboration diagrams, taking a hierarchical approach.  This is designed to combine theory and practise: Having discussed the core notational components, this section focusses on ‘how’ to apply the theory in the real world

  • Elicitation techniques for process modelling
  • Modelling from the ‘top down’:
    • Understanding process scope (trigger and outcome, i.e. start and end events)
    • Model high-level processes
    • Expanding into further detail
  • Discussion of modelling from the ‘bottom up’

Additional Concepts
Having established a clear base-line of knowledge and experience, some additional concepts are introduced.

  • Activities: Tasks (User, Service, None)
  • Data: Data object, data store
  • Artefacts: Text Annotation, Groups

Process Improvement
A brief discussion of how to assess as-is processes and identify areas for possible improvement.  A range of practical tips will be provided.

Working with Stakeholders
This section covers some of the human elements of working with BPMN.  We might sometimes hear stakeholders say that BPMN is ‘too complicated’ or that they do not feel comfortable working with it.  This part of the course is designed to be extremely conversational and to elicit real concerns that attendees have come across, enabling discussion of ways to resolve these.

Additional BPMN Diagram Types
Introduction of other BPMN diagrams.  This section focusses on creating awareness, and a general understanding of how they fit within BMPN, and to provide links to further reading/information for practitioners that want to find out more after the course.  They are not covered in detail

  • Conversation
  • Choreography

Inclusive Material

Each delegate receives a copy of the Blackmetric Course Manual which contains a concise overview of the course.

Course Endorsement

This course is endorsed by IIBA®.

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Next Steps

Want to run the course for your team?

For more information and to book this course for your organisation please contact us:

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