The Art of Business Process Modeling: The Business Analyst's Guide to Process Modeling with UML & BPMN

This slender volume (~100 pp.) provides a succinct introduction to UML (and BPMN) from the perspective of a business process modeling initiative. I see this book as having three main strengths: 1) It is non-threatening. By focusing on BPM and not attempting to be encyclopedic or unnecessarily deep, the content is kept to a manageable size for new-comers to the discipline. It can be digested and understood in a relatively short time frame. I see this as important because many potential audiences including business stakeholders are unwilling to commit to reading a huge tome. 2) Just enough UML. Although there are plenty of books that teach UML, much of what is taught is of little use to a BA -- especially an entry-level BA. The UML taught here is precisely targeted for its usefulness in performing key BA tasks. Instead of showing capabilities targeted at software developers, the approach is truly developing a Business Process Model. 3) Results oriented. This book describes how to produce an effective Business Process Model -- not just techniques, but how techniques can be used to produce something of value to the business. In my experience, there are many business problems that can be solved by following the guidelines in this boo, because a proper BPM process can clear away the cobwebs that prevent stakeholders from approaching the business with a shared understanding. In some cases documenting (or simply inventorying) business processes can stabilize business activities. Of course in many cases the process will reveal (or support a process for discussing) changes that can improve the business.My Recommendation:This is a wonderful book to give to an entry-level BA. If I ran a PMO, or a BA Center of Excellence, I would issue this book as part of an on-boarding process. It is short enough that it can be absorbed quickly. I would include a process for measuring the new recruit's absorption of the material. Follow-up with a brand-new BA would include supervised generation of BPMs within the organization. Note: this (and the book under review) does not address requirements development or requirements management, which I think is best held off on until the new-BA has reached journeyman status.For intermediate-level BAs:Some Journeyman BAs might have no experience with BPM, or perhaps picked up all they learned 'on the go', to those readers, this book's lucid presentation will put it together for them quickly. On the other hand, those comfortable with BPM would be better served by a different text which digs into esoterica and edge cases.For Sr. BAs:I don't really see how a SR BA could could have avoided BPM, however some SR BAs might be comfortable only with older notation systems (ERD, Data-flow Diagrams, & Flow charts). This book does a good job in showing how specific UML diagram types can be used for various BPM sub-processes. For those readers, this book could be much better than a general purpose book about UML (which are usually aimed at documenting software designs).

I highly recommend this book to be used as a reference guideline to develop your BPM approach. If used properly, you would be able to communicate complex business and information systems with simplicity using the models described. This is great for the novice and seasoned business analyst.

I didn't gather much "art" from this introductory text. It also concentrates quite heavily on UML. BPMN has a very small part. I was expecting more on how UML and BPMN might interact. However, on the positive side, it's a very approachable explanation of the model elements of several different model types. Just don't expect to receive answers for difficult modeling problems.

I am a business analyst working in the healthcare and pharma industries. Recently I was assigned to document a number of our business processes. I have drawn some Visio diagrams before but I was looking for a better way to do the work. A search on Amazon turned up this book by Dr. Schedlbauer. I heard him speak before at a conference and knew that he was an expert, so I decided to buy the book and see his approach.His book describes his technique called PROMAP. I found that PROMAP was a pretty good framework to get me organized and to point out that process modeling is more than just drawing Visio diagrams. I particularly liked the other types of models and his advice on how to elicit procedures from my business partners. His discussion of linking processes to rules was great - it made my business partners real happy; they could see which rules applied to their processes.The book is short and to the point, which I really like - not a lot of fluff. The book could give more examples of the diagrams and how to apply PROMAP, but overall the approach is easy to implement. We use flowcharts and UML, but not BPMN, so I did not dive deeply into the section on BPMN modeling but I expect to do that soon. The book explains UML well and we will adopt more of that going forward.Overall, I would recommend this short and to the point book to anyone whose job it is to map out business processes or who works as a business analyst.

Scarce book from BA wonderworld.

I liked this book. It provided a good foundation for me to learn BPM

Meets expectations.

I bought this book based on other reviews, but unfortunately, I cannot agree with their findings. This book is so extraordinarily "lite" that it provides virtually no information of any substance. Please do not be misled, there is no well-defined methodology explained here, no consistent and progressive examples to follow, and nothing really that will help you to build better models. Spend your money elsewhere!