BPMN.io for documentation purposes

Users
1

Hi All,

first of all thank you very much for sharing this tool with everybody as OpenSource.

Previously we did our process documentation in word and visio, but we got to learn the bounderies of these tools relatively quickly, thus started the search for a better way and found bpmn and bpmn.io. I read the provided walkthrough and looked at the examples. They gave me a good overview for the tasks at hand but before I try it, i would like to check with you guys, if I’m on the right track:

  • Responsibility-assignment (most commonly known as RACI): We would like to assign individual tasks to certain people. We could do it with swim-lanes but this would make the process very confusing.
    ** Would it be the best way to use customized attributes for the assignment to roles/person? e.g. who is responsible, who is deputy/standby…
    ** Had someone already experience with generating the RACI template based on these attributes?

  • Because we would use this for process documentation, we would like to include links to further documentation, images and maybe videos, to support the documentation. We were planning to use the comment box for this purpose.
    Currently hyperlinks (to docs, video, images) in the comment-box are not clickable.
    ** Does someone already have a workaround for it?
    ** If we have to programm it, do you think the comment-box would be the right way?
    ** There are some downturns with it, but would it be possible to embed some images in the process chart or would it be in conflict with BPMN 2.0? The example with the cats doesn’t seem to be the right approach.

Thanks in advance for all the feedback.

Christian

2

Hi @Chris1,

thanks for your kind words. I am seriously happy to hear that you decided to move on regarding your process documentation, word and visio are very limited indeed.

About your questions:

  • Lanes are the correct method in BPMN to map responsibilities. How come you thing this makes the process confusing? There are some modelling techniques you can apply to increase clarify of your model, depending what it is suffering from.

  • Custom attributes are not a good idea to add information about responsibilities - better use ‘text annotations’

  • In order to enrich the model with additions information as links, videos, text etc. it is advised to use a tool like ‘confluence’ and embed individual process models there.

  • Embedding images in the process model would definitely be conflicting, what do you want to achieve exactly?

From your description is seems like you should also have a look at https://cawemo.com - a tool build on bpmn.io which helps you to create a transparent and accessible process landscape collaboratively.

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