Modelling with BPMN - roles in the lane

Hi Tetiana,

your approach is a good way to handle lanes.

Be aware that BPMN is very flexible using lanes. The BPMN specification says:

"Lanes are used to organize and categorize Activities within a Pool. The meaning of the Lanes is up to the modeler.
BPMN does not specify the usage of Lanes. Lanes are often used for such things as internal roles (e.g., Manager,
Associate), systems (e.g., an enterprise application), an internal department (e.g., shipping, finance), etc."

You are free to use it as you (or your organization) like. Indeed I also often use lanes for positions (to stay with the ARIS naming conventions with the differentiation between "position" and "role", where role is the type of the position). It sometimes depends on the kind of process (if more technical oriented then a lane also can be an IT-System) or the level of modeling. When I am on a higher level I also use organizational units as lane. To realize a connection between organizational units (departments) and positions you can use the BPMN functionality that lanes can be nested. You can have an organizational unit lane that is diveded in several position lanes.

Regards

Klemens

Hi Tetiana,

some additional remarks on Klemens comment. When you nest lanes the "carries out" connection between a task and lane object (role or position) will only be made to the most inner lane.

Some people find it a good idea to use roles in the process and have the process own the role. Then you understand the role as a set of required skills or authorizations in the context of the process. So the role represents the "demand" side from the perspective of the process, hence the role description is in the domain of the process owner. In org. charts or matrix models you can match the roles to the positions, thus granting the authorizations to people occupying the positions.