Our BPMessentials BPMN Method and Style live-online class July 29-31 takes advantage of improvements in the Signavio BPMN editor.  Signavio is a cloud-based environment providing collaboration and a team repository, so there’s nothing to install.  You just connect with your browser, and go.  A key reason why we can use Signavio for the BPMN training is it has the Method and Style validation rules built in.  That’s great for students, because being able to see style errors in real time while you model helps not only to clean up the models but is remarkably effective in help them remember the rules.  But it’s even more critical for me, since I need to review all those mail-in certification exercises  from students.  The new version 7.1, released last week, is a lot better because instead of validating each process level diagram individually, as the previous versions did, it validates the entire model at once.

In Method and Style, end-to-end models are composed as a hierarchy of process levels, typically a single top-level diagram and many child-level diagrams, each representing a subprocess.  Instead of separate high-level and detailed models which you continually need to keep in sync, hierarchical modeling in BPMN puts everything in a single definition file that supports both high-level and detailed views of the process.  So no synchronization is needed, and you can zoom in or out to see details at any level.  Many of the style rules are designed to ensure human traceability between the process levels.  In a tool they are hyperlinked, but we assume ultimately they will be shared as paper or pdf.  The new Signavio validation procedure shows a consolidated list of both spec errors and style errors on any diagram in the process model.

The Method and Style approach has proven successful in getting all the process modelers in an organization on the same page with respect to BPMN, so there models can effectively be shared and understood.  That is really the point of a standard language, but without some guidelines and methodology beyond what you get from the spec, it’s hopeless.  The live-online class gives you that, teaching you the shapes and symbols you need and which ones you can ignore, as well as a practical methodology for creating models that are consistently and correctly structured, shareable between business and IT, and easy to understand from the diagram alone.

To internalize the material, students get 60 days use of the tool after the training, during which they complete certification, based on an online exam and a mail-in exercise.  No extra cost for that, it’s all built in.  If you want to get the full benefit of process modeling with BPMN, you ought to give it a try.

The next class is July 29-31 from 11am to 4pm ET each day (that’s 5pm-10pm each day CET).  Click here for more information, or just click here to sign up.