How can you use BPMN to document business processes?

3 Step 3: Create your BPMN diagram

A BPMN diagram is composed of four fundamental elements: events, activities, gateways, and flows. Events are triggers or results of a process, such as a beginning, an ending, or a message. Activities are tasks or sub-processes that are completed within a process, such as a service, a user task, or a call activity. Gateways are decision points that control the flow of a process, like an exclusive, an inclusive, or a parallel gateway. Flows are connectors that show the sequence, message, or association between elements, for example a solid line, a dashed line, or a dotted line. To create your BPMN diagram effectively, you must start with a pool that represents your organization or process. Then add a start event to indicate the trigger of your process and activities and sub-processes to describe the main actions. After this add gateways to define the branching and merging of your process flow and end events to specify the outcomes. You should then add message flows to show the communication between your process and other participants or systems as well as association flows to link artifacts such as data objects, groups, or annotations to other elements. Lastly add labels and descriptions to make your diagram more readable and understandable.

4 Step 4: Validate and refine your BPMN diagram

Creating a BPMN diagram requires validation and refinement to guarantee accuracy, completeness, and clarity. You can review it against your process scope and objectives, test it for logic and consistency, simplify it for readability and maintainability, and solicit feedback from stakeholders and users. Doing so will help you benefit from the advantages of BPMN such as documenting business processes in a standard and intuitive way, optimizing workflows, and achieving goals. Additionally, BPMN can help you design, document, and communicate your business processes more effectively.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?