Roadmap: How To Adopt Business Process Sketching
This roadmap describes how to adopt the Business Process Sketching practice.
Main Description

Getting Started 

Start by becoming familiar with the Tool palette by sketching a simple  Business Process Diagram that uses a single Lane, a Start Event, and a single End Event, with a single Task. Draw connections between these main elements. Share these sketches with the organization and gain feedback on there usefulness.

Once familiar with the basic palette, start developing more complicated sketches that includes a Decision , Pool and multiple Lane and End Events.

Then develop sketches that leverage Sub-Process , Message , Data Object , Fork and  Join

Finally as this is only an introduction to sketching Business Process Diagrams, practitioners are encouraged to increase their acquisition of knowledge and its application by examining the following:

  1. International Institute of Business Analysis http://www.theiiba.org//AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home (IIBATM - is an independent non-profit professional association serving the growing field of Business Analysis) Business Analyst Book of Knowledge
  2. Software Engineering Body of knowledge http://www.swebok.org/
  3. Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI) http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/

Common Pitfalls

This practice is not part of any certification process and only provides an introduction to the role of a Business Analyst and the work they might perform in sketching Business Process Diagram as part of Enterprise Analysis or Requirements Analysis. It is encouraged to go beyond the material in this practice and understand how your own organization describes and applies business process sketches.

One other thing to note, many people are familiar with flow diagrams and like to draw as many diagrams as possible, but as the number of diagrams increases so does the maintenance, it is better to have a few diagrams that are re-used many times, in many projects to maintain consistency and accelerate adoption, than to sketch a new diagram for every project, which are very similar.

80% of projects are updates to existing systems but people want to always create new diagrams. Re-use is difficult to enforce but tools can help identify what sketches have already been developed, and encourages reference to sketches created in other projects, rather than creating something new.