Whiteboards are probably one of the most effective tools to sketch your ideas or to brainstorm with your colleagues. Often, whiteboards are combined with post-it notes to visualise ideas of different people. Whiteboards and post-it notes are also used in many business process management efforts, for example to define the initial process design or to extract process knowledge from process participants. It is also a great tool to come up with improvement ideas. In sum, whiteboards and post-it notes are usually used before process modelling.
ARIS Express is a tool meant for BPM entry users. We hope to bring BPM to the masses by providing an easy to use tool with a simplified modelling method. In the latest ARIS Express 2.0 release (upgrade instructions), we added a new model type called Whiteboard. Basically, it is your virtual whiteboard providing post-it notes ;-)
A whiteboard in ARIS Express allows you to structure your BPM effort. For example, you can define the main activities of a business process as so called stages. Each stage can be further refined with additional details like:
- contained activities
- goals of the stage
- relevant KPIs to measure the success of the stage
- details
Attached to this post I added a whiteboard outlining the overall product development process. In literature, this process has several stages such as product innovation and introduction. I further defined the main activities of the innovation stage, which includes activities such as generating ideas and assessing them. I also added some KPIs and goals so that you get an idea how a whiteboard model could be used.
It will be interesting to see how people use this model. I think in some way it is similar to a process landscape (value-added chain diagram), which you could also use to structure your project into stages and activities. The whiteboard has some advantages, because you can also define KPIs and goals.
Do you think whiteboard models are useful to collect BPM knowledge? Please share with us your usage of whiteboard models!
Sebastian,
1. Will this be made available in the professional model, or what is recommended mapping to existing model?
2. I like the idea of notes, but prefer unstructured format. This model sems to be a combination of freedom and structure which I do not find easy to manage. I would prefer to see the notes symbols available in the general diagram and then use it as we see fit.
thanks
donald
I like the whiteboard. As this is often the starting point for starting with the process design.
I miss the capability of adding additional rows above the ones that are defined and I would lalso prefer if we could add other sysmbols, like person/department responsible.
Don,
what I like to do in this case is to simple add a new (handwriting) font to my installation and format free texts by default as note using this font. Some notations (like BPMN) contain annotations as allowed objects, so I can add informal notes as needed - which will be removed before QA of course.
In regards to the Whiteboard model (and its implementation in ARISalign) the notes seem to serve multiple object types, since you can simply drag them to a process model and they get converted to functions, which is the most likely use case. I am wondering how you match those if you don't want to indroduce sticky note types for goals, KPIs as well ... Sebastian?
-Roland
PS: My favorite font is "Komika" available for free at http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/list/search .
Sorry folks, I totally missed the comments to this thread...
@Don: The whiteboard gives a lot of structure. If you need more freedom, the general diagram is the way to go.
@Roland: ARISalign is meant as a kickstart to BPM. Therefore, there is nothing like "object types". In that sense, it is different to the traditional ARIS products. Also, KPIs and goals are things, which are not available in BPMN, but which is used for process modelling.
@all: Just in case you missed it, I just wrote another article about the integration of ARISalign and ARIS Express.