Checklist Description

This checklist can be used to select an appropriate business process modelling technique.

Checklist

• Flowcharts:

  • Purpose to show the sequence and iteration of actions in a process

  • Advantages visual, easily understood

  • Disadvantages misses out on a key aspect of a business process: people

• Deployment flowcharts:

  • Purpose same as flowchart except there are swim-lanes to show which activity is done by whom

  • Advantages visual, easily understood, shows the roles that people play

  • Disadvantages often process is only described from one point of view

• Role-activity diagrams:

  • Purpose similar to a flowchart except that they also highlight interactions between types of individual (e.g. a purchasing clerk sending a purchase order for approval to his/her supervisor). Business events are also mapped

  • Advantages visual, easily understood, shows events and interactions

  • Disadvantages often process is only described from one point of view

• Dataflow diagrams:

  • Purpose describes process in terms of input, process, output. These can be strung together to show the flow of information/data/resources through a process

  • Advantages good to determine data/processing requirements for a system

  • Disadvantages not a natural way of conceptualizing a process, ignores the people factor

• Process-hierarchy decomposition:

  • Purpose describes a process by starting at the top level and decomposing the process into sub-processes then decomposing those processes, and so on

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