The process of building a BPMN

After reviewing BPMN and Connecting Objects, Pools, Swimlanes and Artifacts. The underlying concept of a BPMN is process. When drawing a BPMN, it is important to understand the process is simplistic steps and as you develop understanding, add more steps to elaborate the process.

Please note that below is a suggested/recommended step by step process to build a BPMN for a started. However, there are various ways to go through this.

The first steps is to identify the key steps, start and end points. For example, in the below diagram, when an order is initiated, it is important to receive an order, check credit, fulfill an order, and send invoice.

The next step is to find alternative paths, as and where required, which might lead to alternative circumstances such as order completion, etc. This includes introducing various gateways which might lead to alternative processes and paths.

Introducing pools and swimlanes: This step is to understand key players, departments, actors within each department/company, etc. and dividing the activities into various pools and swimlanes.

Introduce various artifacts or details for each step. Any documents involved in a step, descriptions, actors, etc. can be shown here. If there are any steps that include multiple substep, then they need to be introduced as a subprocess.

Any message communication between different pools or within the pool can be introduced. Similarly, any errors that need to be handled can be introduced as a last step.