What does a new Business Analysis need to know about Business Process Modeling (BPM)?
The definition of a model is that it is a representation of a real world process, concept or devise.
One of the generally accepted practices in modeling is always to model from three different perspectives.
The three model perspectives (types) that we create for a business process model are:
- A Process Model
- A Data Model
- A Usage or People Model
Let’s look briefly at the definition of these different modeling types.
Process Model address how the system behaves over time, through the execution of business process while defining the relevant events, respective results, the roles, responsibilities, and the inputs and outputs.
Data Model can be defined as a model that represents the unchanging aspect of a system. According to the BABOK “the purpose of a data model is to describe the concepts relevant to a domain, the relationship between those concepts, and the information associated with them.”
Usage Model describes the interaction of a user with the solution. They describe how a person interacts with the solution to fulfill the requirements. They do not describe anything that exists within the solution scope unless that thing is visible to an external user, nor do they describe processing that is invisible to an outside observer.”
Summary
At a minimum you will want to define your business process with these three modeling types. Having a model for each of the types will facilitate communication with your stakeholders and provide the structure for you to define and analyze a significant percentage of your requirements. By borrowing a concept from Quality Management and Six Sigma we gather enough information with these three modeling types to help us identify the supplier, input, process, output, and customer. (SIPOC) These three modeling types can help the business analyst with problems and solution analysis for their project.
