Looking for an excuse to go to beautiful San Francisco?  I’ll be offering my full two-day training on Process Modeling with BPMN as part of the BPM Institute Conference and Training on June 20-21 (Grand Hyatt, 345 Stockton St.).  The Super Early-Bird rate is good until May 11.  Click here to sign up.

Let me say a little more about this training.  It covers both how to think about your business process — what information goes into the process model — and how to use BPMN correctly and effectively at multiple levels.  Level 1 is basic description for process improvement, something any business analyst can do.  We provide a simple top-down methodology useful for visual inspection of the process diagram.  Level 2 is analytical modeling, adding sufficient detail to quantify to-be vs as-is performance metrics using simulation analysis.  This is the main focus of the training, also aimed at business analysts and architects.  We touch a bit on Level 3, which is BPMN as a notation for implementation design, at least to the degree that it brings limitations (and proprietary extensions) to the BPMN 1.0 spec.

BPMN has a reputation for being complicated.  It’s true, the spec includes many different types of gateways and events, but in practice you only need a very small working set, and we show you which ones those are… and a handful of diagram patterns that you actually use.  We explain how to use intermediate events to model exception handling in a way that is simple enough for business but rich enough for architects.  That’s the cool thing about BPMN.

And we’ll cover the deep dark mystery of BPM — how to actually do something useful with simulation analysis.  This part is tool-specific in the particulars, but the principles hold for any decent simulation tool.

A key feature of the training is hands-on with a tool.  We use Process Modeler for Visio from ITP Commerce — a 30-day license is included in the course fee, and if you don’t have already, we can provide an evaluation Visio 2007 license as part of that as well.  As my students in the online version of the training can attest, you need the exercises with the tool to help you really learn the material — something you just can’t get from lecture alone.  Students who want to get the BPMessentials certification will be able to do so by completing and sending in a few exercises after the class.

The great thing about BPMN is you can use any tool.  BPMN is BPMN, at least to the extent your tool follows the spec.  So if you want to understand how to use the full power of Lombardi, Savvion, Tibco, Appian, Intalio — or if you have another BPMN-based BPA/EA tool (Telelogic, iGrafx, Casewise, MEGA…) and just want to learn how to use it more effectively, this training is for you.

If you’ve been wondering what’s behind all the fuss about BPMN, meet me in San Francisco in June.