BPM summary

PROCESS LIFECYCLE:

It is composed by several phases:

● Awareness​

: awareness of the need and the opportunity for process management;

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● Process family elicitation: w

hen we start looking at an organization to improve how

it works, we typically do not even know which are the processes, let alone know how

they are carried out;

● Process elicitation:​

we begin the path towards managing and improving a specific

process by understanding i) which are the goals of the process, ii) which are the

parties involved, and iii) how well is done today. The process elicitation phase ends

with a description of the process as well as with a list of preliminarily identified critical

points and areas for improvement;

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● Process design: once we have clear what we want to achieve and how things are

done today, we can design the process as we want it to be, to better achieve the

goals as we set. Designing the process implies keeping an open mind and

challenging current thinking; ​

● Process implementation and automatization: p

erforming organizational changes

and/or developing IT solutions to automate part of the execution;

● Process monitoring and analysis:​

once the process is in execution, we can have

measures in place to monitor the progress of each individual execution and the

overall quality of the process.

BASIC CONCEPTS:

● Activities​

: they denote some work or action done by a person, group of person, or a

system;

● Sequence flow:​

they specify the order in which activities are to be executed, by

stating that the target activity can only start after the source activity is completed;

● Start and end nodes:​

they denote the starting and ending point of the process. They

can be labeled to denote when a new execution of the process is started and the

status in which a process execution ends. ​

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● Events:​

represent either facts that are observed by a process or that are

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communicated by a process;

● Gateways:​

they allows the sequence flow to choose a different path based on some

conditions. In this way, we will execute different activities. They control the passage

of the flow. ​

PRIVATE PROCESSES: when we look inside the BPMN pool. This is what the organization

view from the inside. The private process denotes how we internally implement a given

service or functionality. ​

PUBLIC PROCESSES: It is the the view of the private process towards a specific

participant, and it includes what we want to expose about our process to a given participant,

that is, it is the process as seen by the other participant. It does not include so many details.

The person interested in it does not care to understand the whole process itself but just the

overall idea of what it happens inside.

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COLLABORATION: It shows the interactions between two or more participants. The

interaction among participants is shown in terms of message flows that connect either the

pools or the nodes in the pool. Useful to study the interaction between to partners.

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CHOREOGRAPHY: It is a process which describes the flow of interactions across two or

more pools. It define the sequences and conditions under which multiple cooperation

independent agents exchange messages in order to perform a task to achieve a goal state.

● Instead of looking at what happens inside, we look at what happens between

participants;

● Focus on interaction and coordination among participants

● DETAILS:

○ Sequence flow: Each participant has, at any time, all the information required

to understand which messages it can expect, and which messages it is

supposed to send.

○ TO BE CONTINUED...

CONVERSATIONS:​

It represents interactions (message exchanges) among participants,

where the message have a common topic. They live between pools rather than within.

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More precisely, a conversation is a set of messages that carries the same c

orrelation

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information (such as a correlation key). The correlation (the topic of the interaction) message

is characterized by an identifier that is present in all messages exchanged in the

conversation.

This information is what is used to route the messages to the correct instance of each

participant.