Over the summer I have been hard at work on a new kind of BPMN training, an app completely based on gamification.  Today it’s ready and open to the public.

Called bpmnPRO, it covers the same material as my BPMessentials BPMN Method and Style training, but in a complementary way.  In addition to explaining how to use the important BPMN shapes and symbols, the BPMessentials training is long on explanation of concepts and context: how is BPMN similar to and different from traditional flowcharting?  what does BPMN really mean by an “activity” or a “process”?  It’s important, but it takes time away from in-class exercises, creating diagrams in a real BPMN tool to model a given scenario.  We do plenty of those, but there is simply not enough time in class for repeat exercises on a single concept.  So students have to do that on their own, usually as they prepare for the post-class certification.  Students have been asking for some kind of workbook of practice exercises, and now bpmnPRO provides it.  That was one motivation.

Another motivation was my curiosity if you could actually learn to create “good BPMN”, following the Method and Style principles, without formal training at all.  To learn some Italian in advance of a European trip in June, I had used an iPad app called Duolingo, and it was a revelation.  There was no explanation of grammar rules, no vocabulary lists, just quiz questions.  You learn the language by making mistakes, “leveling up”, re-doing some sections if necessary.  It helps to use it in conjunction with traditional book learning, but you can learn a lot just with the app alone.  I thought the same kind of gamification approach might work for BPMN Method and Style.  It works best for students who have taken the training or at least have read my book, but actually it’s designed to work all on its own.

So bpmnPRO serves two purposes at once:

  • Pre-certification practice for BPMessentials students
  • Standalone training for everyone else

Since there is no lecture or “teaching” component, just questions and puzzles, the learning is based on a combination of common sense and remembering patterns you have seen before.  The same question may be asked multiple ways:  What does this diagram mean? Which diagram means this?  Which diagram is correct?  Create a diagram that means this.  In each level of bpmnPRO, the questions start out easy but get pretty hard by the end.

bpmnPRO learners progress through 10 levels:

  1. Basics
  2. Pools and Lanes
  3. Subprocesses
  4. Parallel Flow
  5. Timer Events
  6. Message Events
  7. Error Events
  8. Event Subprocesses
  9. Iteration
  10. The BPMN Game

Most levels comprise 3 lessons of 16 short exercises each – multiple choice questions, pick one or pick many diagrams, and tool-less diagramming using BPMN tiles to model a given scenario.  A few levels have only 1 or 2 lessons.  You can miss up to 3 in each lesson; more than that, you need to re-do it.  The BPMN Game at the end is a selection of the harder puzzles in the app.

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