Comments on: How much BPMN do you need?

By: BPM Research » Primitives and the BPMN DoDAF Subset

BPM Research » Primitives and the BPMN DoDAF Subset — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:48:35 +0000

[...] previous research Jan Recker and I had looked at the uptake of BPMN in practice, and found that there were some language elements that were rarely used in the models we analyzed. [...]

By: ActionBase, Google Wave, BPM and Case Management | ActionBase Blog - Thoughts on Collaboration Process Management Unstructured Compliance and Audit

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 09:44:37 +0000

[...] modeling standard – when so little of the current one (BPMN) is actually used (see the “How Much BPMN do you Need” [...]

By: Which BPMN elements do you actually use? | procper

Which BPMN elements do you actually use? | procper — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 02:03:24 +0000

[...] research Michael zur Muehlen conducted and presented in “How much BPMN do you need?” validates my practical experience: “the average BPMN model uses less than 20% of the [...]

By: craig

craig — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:00:57 +0000

In our implementations we really only use about 20% of the constructs consistently. The problem is for the other 80% we will probably need a couple for a typical implementation BUT the couple are never consistent so we still need the entire set to be sure we can deliver a project.

By: The Leprachaun

The Leprachaun — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:58:33 +0000

YES AND NO

I am the CEO of Process Master and the vast vast majority of users are only using 20% of the available stencil

However, BA’s and process specialists are using it all – which is the beauty of BPMN

So using BPMN for the production of maps and documentation, only needs a fraction of the stencil – and it expands naturally to 100% if you are using it for automation or indept BPI

There is a video of all this on http://www.ProcessMaster.com

Cheers

Alan

By: Has BPMN delivered the expected benefits? « Managing Change – Improving Performance

Fri, 09 May 2008 12:41:54 +0000

[...] process; therefore it may not be a surprise that a recent research conduct by Michael zur Muehlen: How much BPMN do you need? found that “the average BPMN model uses less than 20% of the available vocabulary”; suggesting [...]

By: Andrew Warner

Andrew Warner — Fri, 02 May 2008 02:43:21 +0000

Hi there,
I think your first two conclusions, recommending pragmatism on the part of practitioners and vendors, make a lot of sense. Why would you spend a lot of time and effort, not to mention expense, learning things that will only form a small subset of your work. Particularly when you can fill in the gaps as needed.

The third seems fine on the face of it but consider an analogy. Would the technicians designing and building an airbag system or anti-lock braking system for a car gloss over it because it’s only ever used in 0.1% of car journeys? Obviously not. To have a complete car, which functions as you would like it to in all circumstances, you need all those systems. So saying we don’t need a complete modelling language based on a statistical analysis of diagrams may not be valid.

Using those data to say that the OMG should not spend a lot of time understanding and defining the most complicated and intricate, if least used, elements of a modelling notation is, in my view, a mistake.

By: BPM HOJE » Blog Archive » O BPMN é muito grande

BPM HOJE » Blog Archive » O BPMN é muito grande — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:52:25 +0000

[...] foi surpresa, portanto, ler o artigo “How much BPMN do you need”, de Michael zur Muehlen e Jan Recker. Esse pessoal analisou 126 diagramas BPMN desenhados por empresas e consultores diversos e procurou [...]

By: The Right Amount of BPMN « Go Flow

The Right Amount of BPMN « Go Flow — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 05:07:39 +0000

[...] BPMN to draw business processes, and have counted the occurrance of rate of various elements. He summarized this in a blog post,which came to the conclusion that practitioners could focus on learning and using a small subset of [...]

By: Michael zur Muehlen

Michael zur Muehlen — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 03:03:53 +0000

Matthieu,

Thanks for your comments.

As for your first remark, I have a gut feeling (but don’t have the data to prove or disprove it) that when you move closer to the execution level that there is a crossover point where implementing process semantics relates closely to programming. If you look at the development environments of most BPM vendors these days they are all integrated in Eclipse, giving you easy access to the source code of the adapters / data structures / programs / rule sets etc. you may need to tap into in order to make your process work. While you can create a very detailed specification using a more comprehensive subset of BPMN, the necessary overhead created by the graphical representation of a programming concept may just be too much. For example: In a BPMS I know well you can specify multiple timer events per activity. You could – say – increase the priority of the activity after 2 hours, reassign the activity to somebody else after 4 hours, and notify the manager if it has not been completed after 2 days. Now, when the activity gets reassigned to a different person that holds the same role as the first assignee, do we model this as a different activity in a different swimlane? And how do we represent the notification of the manager (who may reassign the task, but may choose not to work on it)? Details like this today are hidden in the property pages of BPMS. It is an open question, whether we should make them visible in our process models.

As for the second remark, we tried a cluster analysis on the models themselves, to see whether we could find commonalities in BPMN usage between models that were created for a similar purpose. Unfortunately, the models did not cluster at all – the reason being that each model was created with a fairly distinct subset of BPMN. If we had a larger base to draw from we might be able to find multiple cores – I would like to think that several well defined sets of constructs will emerge over time.