Brainstorm and Take Notes for Designing Business Process

BP-VA is a full-featured business process modeler. BP-VA lets you not only to draw business process diagram, but also record users' requirements during the meeting through a note-taking feature called "Brainstorm." From the notes collected, it can derive an initial BPD. This helps ensure all important thoughts from users are well recorded and won't be lost when constructing business process model.

In this tutorial, you will act as a business analyst who is going to meet with Peter, the manager of an online bookstore. Peter wants to formulate the daily operations to improve efficiency. And he will share on how book ordering works currently. After that, you will draw a BPD based on the information collected during the meeting.

Meet and Take Notes with Brainstorm

1. Before the meeting begins, let's create a Brainstorm (diagram).
   
2. Name the diagram Book Order. The diagram applies a corkboard theme. You may freely "stick" notes on it in an ad-hoc manner.
   
3. Press F11 to run BP-VA in full screen mode. This gives you a larger corkboard for creating notes.
4. The meeting starts. Here is part of the conversation between you and Peter:

   ... You: How do you process customers' orders? Peter: Well, we process customers' orders on a daily basis. Every evening, we gather all orders received during the day. Then we prepare products for shipments. After we pack them based on the order lists, we send the boxes. ...

5. When Peter speaks, you need to take notes on what he said. Let's create the first note. Press on the yellow note in the Diagram toolbar and drag it onto the corkboard to create one.
   
6. That they process customers' orders on daily basis could be an important piece of information. Type in on daily basis for note content and click Ctrl-Enter to confirm.
   
   At this point, you may not be perfectly sure whether the notes you create are utlimately important or not. As long as you think that the information may help you model, it is worthwhile to note it down for now. The key idea is to add notes in a casual manner. Do not spend too much time on judging the importance of the content. Otherwise, you may miss out information that is really important during the process of strenuous sorting.
7. Listen to what Peter says and continue to create notes. Here are a few notes that have been collected so far:
   
8. Let's continue with the conversation:

   ... You: Let's see... How about holidays? Do you guys work during the holidays? Peter: Good question. Any orders placed on a holiday will be processed on the next business day. ... You: Thanks for coming to the meeting. I will prepare a business process model with these information. See you.

9. Let's create a note: order in holiday, process next business day. Keep in mind that the notes are just for you to recall the conversation when you start building the model. Grammar and spelling are not big issues here.
   

Develop Business Process Model with Collected Thoughts

The meeting ends. You have collected a set of notes:

Now, we are going to create a business process model to reflect how customers' orders are processed by the bookstore. Instead of drawing a BPD from scratch, we could derive one from the notes.

1. Create a BPD via the toolbar.
   
2. Name the diagram Order Processing.
   
3. Create a horizontal pool Bookstore. Add a start event to it.
   
4. Open the corkboard. The notes on daily basis and process in evening collectively tell you that the purchase orders are processed every evening.
   
   We gather that the business process begins "in every evening." Let's name the start event in BPD In Every Evening.
   
5. Go back to Brainstorm. The note gather orders is a user-performed task. Select it. Click on Tag at the bottom left and select Task from the popup menu.
   
6. Produce a task from this note. Click Tag again and select Realize... from the popup menu.
   
7. This popup the Transit Model Element window. You may specify the properties of the element to realize. Give a meaningful name to the task here. Rename gather orders to Collect Orders. Click OK at the bottom right to continue.
   
8. In the Visualize Model Element window, select Show in existing diagram and select the BPD Order Processing to place the task in it.
   
9. Click Show at the bottom right.
10. In the BPD, put the task Collect Orders inside the pool.
    
11. Open Brainstorm again. Take a look at the note Prepare Products. This is again a user-performed task. Follow the previous steps to visualize the note to a task Prepare Products and put it inside the pool.
    
12. Realize the following notes and place the realized elements in the BPD.

    Note	Tag	Model Element Name
    pack	Task	Pack Boxes
    send	Task	Ship Orders

    
    The BPD should look like this:
    
13. Connect the start event and tasks with sequence flow.
14. Add an end event after the final task Ship Orders. Finally, the BPD should look like this:
    
    You may notice that some of the notes are left unrealized. They may become the documentation of elements, or simply be discarded when modeling.

Resources

1. Bookstore.vpp (With Brainstorm and BPD included)