BPMN - between a rock and a hard place

[sargasso]

Could you nice BMPNer's please provide me with links/references to BPMN  material at level somewhere between the specification (all 308 pages) and the mass of 2 page introductories on the web.

What I'm looking for is, I suppose, some sort of mid level tutorial and/or pattern analysis info.

For example, I'm having trouble deciding what constitutes an  atomic level activity - or how one decides to pare the steps in a process.  Say we have the goods dispatch process, I could model it as 2 activities, "Pick&Pack" + "Send", or any number of finer detail activities.  What'e the guidelines?  is there any relevant practice material available on the web.

tia
bruce

[«Midnight»]

There's not as much out there as I'd like to see Bruce. Or at least there wasn't when I first looked around about 9 months ago, and I've not stumbled over much since then.

While you look, here's a bit of a long shot. BPMN is one of several common descendants of ebXML and its immediate ancestors. Another is UMM/CEFACT (don't ask me to translate). Look up the latter - I don't have the URL handy. There was a handbook of sorts that came out in parts, more or less concurrent with their draft 0.9x standard. The book gave some limited guidance on what they expected during the business decomposition process, including how to find a meaningful level - across the scope of the work - at which you should stop.

The guide is much less 'dense' than the BPMN standard (or UMM for that matter, but you won't really need to go through that one). It is written to be read, rather than referenced.

If you don't find anything else this might give you a reference point. If you do find something please let me know.

David

[sargasso]

The best thing I've found so far is this one from PESOA http://www.pesoa.org/pages/Publications/Fachberichte022004/PESOA_TR_1-2004.pdf
- there are a few minor discrepencies which may be due to the translation.  It does a failrly good presentation of UML activities, Petri nets and BPMN.

But wait there's more ....

Unreviewed
http://www.pesoa.org/pages/Publications/Fachberichte101504/PESOA_TR_8-2004.pdf

[«Midnight»]

Good references Bruce,

FWIW:

I wish that more of their publications were available in English. [My German was never good, totally oriented towards a completely different technical field, and I've not used it in almost 40 years. The end result is that I keep thinking I should know what it says, but I'm just plain wrong.]

The second article provides several examples, not worked through in detail, but concentrating on the business side at the CIM level. The authors point out that the examples are at varying levels of completeness, for good reason. Still, as far as your original question, I think this is an excellent point of departure.

I'm going to finish a detailed read through, then model the examples as best I can in EA. Once that's done I'll read through the first reference you gave - I also have many of their background references here - and repeat the EA exercise, both in BPMN and UML. It will be interesting to compare the results.

David