BPMN path costings

[mark.myers]

With BPMN diagrams in EA is there any way to do a "Path cost" analysis, or something like that? I'm thinking something like having weights of some sort applied to each activity and then each endpoint displaying some sort of weighted cost through the process. All a bit vague at the moment, I know.

[sargasso]

Interesting!  Please let us know of anything you find.  Including references to the use of this.

bruce

[mark.myers]

Conceptually this is not hard but it would take a bit to get it going. I envisage an AddIn - or an extension to the current one - that could traverse the model and add up weights (a new tag) for each activity until an end point is reached. The tricky bits are what to do for sequence flows that return to a previous activity, sub-processes and split flows. These tricky bits are quite tricky indeed. For my current purposes I'm not sure it's justified to spend the effort. When I was presenting EA to a client this week one of the BA's said "yeah but can it do path costings, I've read that other BPMN tools can."; my view - and the view of the client - is that they don't do that now (they manage their processes in unstructured Visio diagrams) and that they don't really NEED it. Given that, the client is unlikely to want to spend the dollars to have a it developed and I'm unlikely to do it for fun...but you never know.

[«Midnight»]

There are tools that do path - and entire process group - costings. These tools can evaluate something along the lines of a pi-calculus, or use numerical means to approximate the same thing.

This involves a lot of front-end work, and the tools reflect this in price.

This would be a very nice feature to have on a brochure. For those who depend on process costings to get their projects done there is no doubt it would be valuable. However, most (perhaps the vast majority) of users would never see this feature in practice.

Now that BPMN is part of the core product it becomes more difficult where to draw the line between an add-on (product) and core functionality of EA. Perhaps a generalized process metric tool would be appropriate for an add-on product. Such a tool might extend not only BPMN but other process modelling paradigms, and also add value to the project management stuff. Perhaps it could even be used to add value to use cases etc.

Just my 0.02 CAD.

David

[mark.myers]

Thanks, David, good ideas.

I've just been having a look at the pi-calculus stuff - very interesting.

Yes it would be a good to expand it to more than just BPMN. The current metrics tool in EA is limited to usecases and is a bit simplistic. So, yes, perhaps a revamped smart metric tool that could be used for any model.