Among the numerous virtues of BPMN, foremost is vendor independence, giving process modelers many tools to choose from, all describing processes using the same shapes and semantics. That’s huge, since without low-cost (or even free) tools you’ll never establish a culture of process broadly throughout the business. Occasionally, however, a student in my BPMN training will ask the embarrassing question, “So that means I can take the models I create in this class and import them into the BPMN tool we use in our company…

Earlier this year I wrote an article outlining the critical relationship between the Process Life Cycle and the Project Life Cycle. This relationship, when treated as a partnership of equals, can improve the success of both the technical and the process improvement interests. In addition to the Project Life Cycle, there are two other important relationships that should be considered when developing or enhancing a business process.

At this point, the business benefits of business process management seem clear. Virtually every sector of society, including areas that seem relatively impervious to dramatic change, such as higher education and government, are becoming much more outcome-oriented....

One of the most powerful features of BPMN is the least appreciated… by modelers and tool vendors alike. I’m talking about subprocesses. Most of the process models I have seen would be much improved if they were used more liberally, and more effectively. 

In BPMN, a process is viewed as a flow of activities, and an activity – a rectangle in the diagram – can signify only one of two things: a task, meaning it has no subparts of interest to the model, or a subprocess, meaning the activity has subparts of significance to the model.

As I attend and present at industry BPM conferences, I often survey the participants, asking them to raise their hands if they are from IT departments. Generally, about 30 to 45 percent of the hands go up. I then ask people to raise their hands if they are from the...