End of last year we published our BPMN-Poster. The poster is available in German and English, you can get it printed (0,7 x 1 meter) or download it from our website. We distributed it at trade shows and events, and used it inour trainings. The feedbackk is very positive – e.g. “The BPMN big poster was a big hit in my office. Some of my colleagues asked if you have any pdf copy that they can have.”

There are already a good number of BPMN posters around. The most popular is maybe the one from our colleagues in Berlin (BPM-Inititative) which can be ordered e.g. at the singanvio site. Why create a new poster? In short I was not satisfied at all with the existing versions. There are two reasons for this:

• The existing ones focus on notation only.
• They try to show the complete notation.

Both will not work in practice.

We tried another way:

• Content first!
• Select the elements needed by your targed audience,

Instead of asking “Which elements doesn BPMN have and what can we do with it?” reverse the question: “What do we want to show? Does BPMN offer any element for this content?”. It seems a small difference but it isn’t! If we start with the notation we try to solve each and every problem with it. If you hold a hammer in your hand everything looks like a nail. If we ask for the needed content first we can judge if the used notation is suitable for this.

Selection of elements for your target audience: Nobody needs the complete BPMN. The standard already defines different conformance level: Descriptive BPMN, Analytical BPMN, Common Exectuable and Full BPMN. This addresses different audiences, In my opinion it doesn’t make sense to show all levels in one poster. Since I’m at home at the business level I created a poster “BPMN 2.0 for Business Analysts”. That’s a pretty small set of elements! It has also in mind who the addressee of our models is. On the business level this are people usually without a BPMN certification!

If you follow this approach there should be other posters, e.g. BPMN for Workflow Programming. This is not my playgorund. I would be happy to see somebody to go this way.

A Poster is always a short presentation to make some appatite. More knowledge is needed.

If you want to order the printed version of the poster – please contact us (unfortunately shipping is not free). We look forward to feedback and suggestions for improvement.

Best regards

Juergen

PS: More on how to adopt notations soon.