Pragmatic Guidelines for Business Process Modeling

Abstract

This document presents an overview of pragmatic guidelines for undertaking business process modeling tasks. These guidelines can support practitioners and non-experts in the difficult task of modeling business process models. In particular, the guidelines focus on obtaining high quality of business process models in terms of their quality as a model, i.e. as a representation of a certain reality. In other words, the guidelines do not say anything about the quality of business processes as operationalization of a certain business strategy: they do not make statement in terms of e.g. cost effectiveness, customer friendliness, … The guidelines presented in this paper focus on the quality of the model as a representation of a reality: is the representation correct w.r.t the reality, does it make a correct use of the symbols, is it understandable, … etc. A more detailed description of the different dimensions of model quality used in this paper can be found in [1]. The guidelines presented in this document have been derived from a systematic literature review [2] and are supplemented with other aspects the authors consider relevant in order to make the guidelines more useful (e.g., threshold values, action or example, description, and associated quality metrics). The guidelines have a wide applicability across various industries and business processes modeling tasks. They are aimed at students and practitioners who are new to the task of business process modeling.