BPMN: How to model 2 decisions back to back

[gareth.jones@business-analysis.com.au]

Hi all,

It’s been a long time since I had to model something in BPMN and I’m wondering what the best way to proceed is.  It’s a pretty straight forward process, I’m just not sure how to properly reflect it in the model with 2 consecutive decisions.

Task 1 – User logs a request for something.

Decision 1 – Manager approval, yes or no.  No = process terminates.

Task 2 – If approved, workflow continues.

Decision 2 – Is the request urgent?  If yes, call Service Desk to escalate for urgent action, Service Desk workflow is followed.  If no, secondary workflow to support team is followed and will be handled within SLA.

How should I represent the approval gateway followed by escalation gateway back-to-back.  They are not parallel tasks, you can’t proceed to escalation without approval.

Thanks

[gareth.jones@business-analysis.com.au]

Hi Mike

I’ll give this a go and hopefully assist, at least a little.

Firstly, there’s nothing wrong in BPMN to have successive decisions, it’s just a question of who the actor is that makes these decisions so we know where to place them.

Attached is my version of the scenario you’ve given which factors in the below assumptions:

1. All actors are within the one organisation so sit within the one pool
2. The Manager simply approves or denies the request  and does not make a decision on the urgency
3. If the Manager approves the request, a case immediately passes on the Helpdesk queue
4. The User makes the decision as to whether the task is urgent and calls Helpdesk if it is.  This call simply speeds up the triage and does not directly result in the case being actioned

 

This model doesn’t factor in all the possible communications and many other factors of course but hopefully assists with your main query.  Happy to assist further if I can and I welcome anybody else’s constructive feedback – I’m a little rusty on BPMN also!

Cheers, Brendan

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[gareth.jones@business-analysis.com.au]

Thanks Brendan, the example you provided looks a hell of a lot better than the model I was developing.

I was finding the model started to get too complex as 1 team had 2 different process flows depending on the outcomes of the decisions, so I ended up splitting Urgent and Non-Urgent into two different models.  Now at least I only have 1 clear gateway for approval and the end users can more easily follow it.  Also made it a lot easier to transcribe into the detailed process description table by splitting them.

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