This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of Method and Style, and over the years it has held up well.  Method and Style is a set of conventions layered on top of the BPMN standard – and, more recently, DMN and CMMN as well – intended to make the meaning of the model clear and complete from the printed diagrams alone.   As a standard based on diagrams, BPMN promises “What you see is what you get,” but the task force developing the spec actually was working toward a slightly different goal: “What you model is what you execute.”  And what you see is definitely not everything that you model.  Method and Style tries to close that gap.

I still hear from managers, “We spend all this money on process mapping projects, but in the end the only ones who understand the diagrams are the people who created them.”  At the root of […]