Maximun number of objects in a lane/maximum length of a lanr

Hello Subash,

I don't know, what the actual technical limit might be, but I know, where the limit of readers of such a process is: Roughly 7 steps. It's the way our brain works. I have modelled processes of 20 or 30 steps myself, plotted them on miles of paper and eventually had a difficult time gaining any acceptance for that. Imagine explaining a process of 700 steps to anybody. How many days, what a waste of time... and who is going to test that process (be it paper test or IT test)?

I know VACD is not part of BPMN and their value is only having a catalogue of headlines. My recommendation: The BPMN way would indeed be using Subprocesses or Call Activities (if you have anything like re-usable subroutines). A good criterion for delimiting a subprocess is when the actor changes, so when you have actors as lanes, after each step you have a change of lane (at least for one branch) of the process flow.

And the BPMN "split and knit" works via Pools representing processes that exchange messages, giving you closed, testable entities. Model one pool white-box per model and do the interfaces using black-box pools with occurrence copies of the participant objects and message objects.

Maybe you can elaborate on the motivation of the requirement you stated?

What is the value of a process map? It's a catalogue of all process models. I promise you, if you want to show their relationships on that level you will prove, that the world is complex, but nobody will actually take a closer look at that and maintaining the relationships is error prone. So you might just as well take a structuring model and place one representative object of each process in that, assigning it with one of your Collaboration Diagrams each. Another idea: collect all Participant objects (black-box) in that model. They should be assigned with the model containing the white-box representation of the process, anyway (at least my recommendation).

Regards, M. Zschuckelt

Hi Zschukelt,

        Thanks for the comment and i completely agree with you. But there is a requirement from my management to create one end to end process in a single map and see how it will be useful. So, can you or someone in this forum say whether it is technically feasible in ARIS, the way it is now, i am not able create more than 150 objects in a single map.

Thanks,

Subash

Assumed, you have modelled your processes in BPMN collaboration diagrams (or you intend to do so). Each process is represented by a Pool. Make your process map using BPMN collaboration diagram as well, but only place black-box pools on the diagram (you can make them really small). Then connect them with the message flows of inter-process communication. This will give you the high-level overview of inter-process communication in your organization. I dare predict it will look like the web of a spider. And before you go for the entire 700 processes validate with your management after 100 at the latest, if this effort is useful.