New Book – Microsoft Visio 2010 Business Process Diagramming and Validation

For those interested in Process Design and Implementation using Visio 2010, David Parker’s new book Microsoft Visio 2010 Business Process Diagramming and Validation explains Visio diagram validation, the APIs behind it, and shows how to to build tools to make it all much easier!

The target audience for this book is the .Net developer community, Office users and technical folks but may still be of interest to those who wish to understand the depth and breadth of  features available in the new version of Visio.

As to be expected, the book is tutorial in structure and many demonstrations for creating Validation Rules, writing ShapeSheet formulae etc. The example code for these are all included and therefore is great for those who ‘learn by doing’ making the practical and immediately deployable examples very useful.

• Download a free copy of Chapter 2 – Understanding the Microsoft Visio Object Model
• Watch Visio 2010 Video

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BPM Modeling Strategies Explained

I have made a couple of posts on approaches to process modeling and how benefits can be derived from using itterative methods over the last few months. Here is another one that I find very interesting as it explores the eternal question of  ‘BPM Model Preservation vs Model Transformation’.

The recent presentation (with embeded audio) given by Keith Swenson at the  2009 Process.gov conference in Washinton DC on June 19, explains how a process model may or may not change over its lifetime i.e. static business model to execution in a BPMS and what the various considerations and trade offs are.

Keith identifies 3 kinds of change that a process may undergo:

• Business Process Enactment: – the business process as it moves from the beginning to the end of handling a single case. The process definition does not normally change here, only the process instance or context that records the state of a particular case changes.
• Business Process Lifecycle: – these are the changes that a business process goes through from initial concept, to modeling, to integration, and finally to deployment into an enactment environment.
• Business Process Improvement: – the change to a business process that occurs over time through repeated use of the business process lifecycle followed by analysis of how well that version of the business process worked.

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