Visualizing BPM Case Flow

Background: Case Management in BPM is relatively new concept and very few BPM vendors currently offer Case Management.

Problem Statement: Without representing Case Flow in a visual sense, it is very hard for business community to apprehend what the system is achieving for them or if the system has been implemented as per business requirements or to business satisfaction.

Industry trend: While we have BPMN as industry standard for representing BPM flows, CMMN (Case Management Model Notations) is still evolving. Refer the following for the CMMN standard from OMG and an example:

http://www.omg.org/spec/CMMN/1.0/

http://www.opitz-consulting.com/fileadmin/redaktion/pdf/sonstiges/acm-in-practice_poster-a3_sicher.pdf

But these notations are not intuitive and boring, unlike BPMN notations. 

This is the reason, I have to come up with my own notations and way of drawing the case flow diagrams.

Here is a sample diagram, I have drawn:

As shown in the above diagram, the whole case flow is shown from left-to-right as an orchestration of case activities, which are driven by rules. Rules are fired by in-built rule engine, which listens to user and external events and adaptively fires activities to be made available to users as either mandatory or optional activities. 

The case is started as soon a customer request is received and set a set of milestones until the close of the case. A set of case activities are part of milestones. When these set of activities are completed, the milestone is marked as complete and a new set of case activities are made available to the user. When an external user or system event is received the Event Driven Network (EDN) receives the same and fowards it to the rule engine as input. The rule engine is setup with rules which fires upon receiving the events, which would start new activities, complete a milestone etc...

Note that the case flow diagram, which is shown above is purely a conceptual diagram, and in today's market BPM tools, as far as I know, this is not available to view out of the box unlike BPMN flows. But generally it is a good idea to show this kind of diagram in architecture/design diagrams to show a high-level view of how the case would flow after it has been setup. 

Note that, the case activities, milestones, events etc are created as per business requirements. As Case Management is new in the market, business users must understand the concept of Case Management and its advantages so that they can capture the requirements for Case.

Just to make the conversation complete, there a frequently asked question, which people ask me. Where is the BPMN flow after the BPM is setup as a case flow? 

Each case activities a self sustained BPM flow, which gets started when the user starts the case activity. A sample BPMN flow is shown below.

To start the above BPMN activity as a self contained case activities, which takes in some inputs and outputs.

Conclusion: In this discussion, I have tried to create a simple sample case flow diagram, showing how the case flow is generally setup and how the case flow diagram can be drawn. Case flow diagrams gives a high level view of how the business cases will flow end-to-end.

Best Practices of Reviewing Architecture/Design Documents

What is the best practice of reviewing design documents and for that matter any technical word documents like Architecture, High Level, Low Level design documents?

There are two aspect of it.

1) Review comments statistics should be produced at the end of the show
2) Review comments should be specific, which can be tracked.


To support these two aspects, generally people do either of these two:

1) Capture comments in the word documents using the MS word insert comment feature. Using insert comment allows to capture both text and part of a diagram.
2) Capture the comments in a tracker spreadsheet

Both of them has pros and cons as follows

1) Capture comments in the word documents using the MS word insert comment feature

Pros: For technical people who is working on the comments and addressing the comments it is very search to locate the comments and get the specific context of the comment.

Cons: Difficult to support management showing the count of the comments, the severity of the comments, who had worked on which comments, which comments are closed and which are open. Makes the document itself messy.

2) Capture the comments in a tracker spreadsheet

Pros: Gives a clear statistics for management view as discussed above.

Cons: Does not give a precise context of the comment. 

Suggestions:

Do both of them. Have a template spreadsheet to capture the comments to show the management. This will be very helpful to support your own case if you are working as an author of the document or reworking on the document for closure.

Waterpik Flosser

I was a suffering from very bad gum for a long time. I was termed as one of the stinkers in my school days!

This should be hereditary, because my father also has the same issue. He did not take care of this, because he lives in a remote village, doctors visits are rarely possible, and on top of this, he has eats paan, which makes his mouth and teeth red and over the time it dents his teeth seriously.

It went on for a long time, and now also I do not think he is getting a better treatment.

For me, even though visiting doctors may not have been a big issue, but time is always short for me, and I generally a lazy person, who does  not like to visit doctors.

But my bad gum forced me to dental visits mostly in US. And in US, on top of my very costly insurance, I had to pay a hefty fee for every visit (at least approximately $300, which will burden me unexpectedly), and I was advised to take dental appointment every 6 months.

I did not like that at all.

Finally, one of the nurse in US, gave me this suggestion about Waterpik flossers! I went directly to Walmart, CVS and found this Waterpik flossers. They were around $30. Compared to $300, $30 sounded good to me. I started using regularly.

The best part I liked about this is that, once I charge this device, it will least about 7 days, and hence if I have to travel I can carry it in my bag! I simply do flossing at least 3-4 times a week, and specially if I have been eating any non-veg like chicken or mutton.

I travelled from US to UK. In UK initially I tried searching for the same exact type of flosser, but Waterpik has not only different types of devices in UK, their charging plug which connects to the device is not compatible with the US one, and hence finally I had to buy a new one in UK with about 60 GPB. But the water tank if bigger than one I had in US, and the charge capacity is more, and hence I am really satisfied. You can see the image of this device in the middle of this article.

Once I started using this, every time I visit my dental specialist, I never heard any bad news. In fact they praised me, and asked me to continue whatever I am doing.

This gives me a sense of cleanliness immediately in my gums, plus it takes care of the bad smell in mouth. I feel more health, and confident from inside to go out among the friends and talk without hesitation.

I simply love this Waterpik Flosser and I would strongly recommend this to all my close ones.

These are not so costly solution, and they are not complicated to use, we do not need doctor or nurse for using this, plus there is no medicine or side effects, its simply water gun! Natural like Ayurveda! They can be easily taken to villages or remote places and used regularly to stay healthy.

Cheers
Happy Living

Search and Replace using Sublime Text

I was a great fan of VI text editor for a long long time. I started using VI from 1995 in Linux and Solaris systems. Later in Windows, I started using GVIM, which was also not bad. Those who use VI, I do not have to explain the love we have around the pattern searches. I used to love working with fast pattern search and replaces in VI. Emacs was ok, but I never could love it so much within the few attempts I have tried it.

Life moved on, in the enterprise world, I mostly worked in Windows systems, because most my clients are comfortable about it. Besides VI/VIM/GVIM, I still missed the unix commands, and discovered and used cygwin in Windows for my day to day works.

It was great, but faced several pattern search and replace issues, and later around 2010, I started using Textpad because it is a shareware. But still working with XML, directory and column search and replace was always an issue.

Finally recently through one my colleague Ben, I discovered Sublime text, and its a free tool. It is simply awesome with directory search, XML and column searches. I simply love it....