BPM and Process Modelling
23 important questions on BPM and Process Modelling
What is Business Process Management (BPM)?
What is the connection between information technology and business value?
In what two ways can you engage in BPM? Explain both ways.
- Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR): Aims to achieve breakthrough. Puts into question the fundamental assumptions and principles of the existing process structure.
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What are business processes? And give some examples.
Examples are: order-to-cash, quote-to-order, procure-to-pay, application-to-approval, fault-to-resolution (or issue-to-resolution), and claim-to-settlement
What is the difference between positive and negative outcomes of a process?
Mention the four core elements of a process and explain them.
- Events: Events are passive elements, they represent conditions or circumstances, they are atomic and instantaneous
- Business objects (or data): these are organizational artifacts that undergo state changes, the information can be physical or electronical
- Actors (or resources): these are the entities that perform process activities and generate events, it can be humans and/or systems
There are three different process perspectives. Mention and explain them.
- Data perspective: what do we need to work on, input/output data to activities, complements the control flow
- Resource perspective: who is doing the work, human participants and systems that perform control flow activities and generate events, complements the control flow
What is process identification?
Also citeria to priotitize the management of these processes are established
Why do you do process identification?
What is the output of process identification? Explain.
What are the two phases in process identification and mention the steps within each phase.
- Evaluation phase/Process selection: Evaluate processes, alignment with strategic objectives, health (e.g. performance, compliance, sustainability), culture and politics, feasibility to being successfully improved, risk of not improving them. Example for doing this is the APQC Process Classigication Framework
The evaluation phase within process identification answers three questions. What are these questions and to what does this lead?
The second question is about dysfunction: Which processes are in the deepest trouble?
The third question is about feasibility: Which process is the most susceptible to successful process management?
These three questions lead to Process Portfolio Management.
What are the four phases in process discovery? Explain them.
2. Gathering information; building an understanding of the process. Different discovery methods can be used to acquire information on a process.
3. Conducting the modeling task: organizing the creation of the process model. The modeling method gives guidance for mapping out the process in a systematic way.
4. Assuring process model qualtity: guaranteeing that the resulting process models meet different quality criteria. This is important for establishing trust in the process model.
Who is involved in process discovery?
What are the challenges in process discovery?
- Domain experts think on instance level: they think they know what is possible (?)
- Knowledge about process modelling is rare
Mention all process discovery techniques and one strength and weakness of every technique.
- Observation: S: context-rich insight into process. W: Potentially intrusive, stakeholders likely to behave differently, only few cases.
- Automatic discovery: S: Extensive set of cases, objective data. W: potential issue with data quality.
- Interview: S: detailed inquiry into process. W: requires sparse time of process stakeholders, several iterations required before sign-off.
- Workshop: S: direct resolution of conflicting views. W: synchronous availability of several stakeholders.
To set up the business process model you need to gather information/material. What are the different steps to do this? And explain the first step.
2. Identify activities and events.
3. Identify resources and their handovers.
4. Identify the control flow.
5. Identify additional elements.
Mention at least 4 different modelling notations/languages.
What are the semantics when a transition executes in a Petri net?
- it consumes one token from each of its input places
- it produces one token in each of its output places
What happens if you have a loop in your Petri net?
What are workflow nets and what are its characteristics?
- it has one input place (source place): a place with only outgoing arcs
- it has one output place (sink place): a place with only incoming arcs
- the nets is strongly connected: there is a directed path between any pair of nodes
Mention the four types of elements in BPMN.
Tasks (rectangles with rounded corners)
Flow (arcs/arrows)
Gateways (diamonds)
What are the four routing patterns in BPMN? Explain and draw them in Petri net and in BPMN.
- Parallel: A and B at the same time or in any order, there are AND-splits (parallel split pattern) and AND-joins (synchronization pattern)
- Choice: A or B, there are XOR-splits (exclusive choice pattern) and XOR-joins (simple merge pattern)
- Iteration: multiple A's (strucutured loop pattern)
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