Yesterday I received the mail I was waiting for. Like I said before, I was taking the BPMN course of Bruce Silver. At the end of the course you get 2 exercises you have to solve and return to Bruce. After some hours of puzzling and drawing diagrams I came to an acceptiable solution (in my opinion) and sent it to Bruce. Although the first attempt wasn’t correct I received the response yesterday that the second attemp was a correct solution. So now I may call myself a certified BPMN consultant :-)

As posted before I am working as a business analist at my current assignment. I am using BPMN to create diagrams to describe the business processes at my client’s company. Because I wasn’t familiair with BPMN, I looked around to find the best way to master this technique. Besides a lot of basic articles I ran into two interesting sites, both have to do with Bruce Silver.
First there is this site at which you can register for his BPMN course in different formats.
Besides the training of Bruce I also found these articles he wrote. This will give you a basic idea about the theory you can expect in the training, but of course you are missing the hands-on exercises and other stuff that’s in the training.
I haven’t finished the training yet but until now (I am half way) I like it very much and I have learned much more then I would by just reading books (it’s also more expensive then a few books so that’s fair :-)).
The final thing I want to mention about Bruce is his blog with interesting posts about BPMN. Now that is enough advertisement for Bruce.
Of course, mastering BPMN alone will not make you a good business analyst. On the other hand, making sure your BPMN diagrams don’t violate the BPMN rules, won’t make you a worse business analyst neither!

For my current project we are performing a Business Process analysis. The goal is to catch all relevant business processes in a Business Process Model. This model will then be used as base for a SOA implementation of a new system, which will support the customer in his business much better then the current system.
As notation for the diagrams of our BPM (Business Process Model) we use BPMN (Business Process Model Notation). Although there is some discussion if you should use this notation or just the available UML diagrams, I chose to use BPMN, as I expect this to become the (defacto) standard, if it isn’t this already.
After we have modeled the relevant processes we would like to translate the BPMN diagrams to BPEL diagrams. But before we have reached this step, we first have to identify which processes are suitable to be implemented by web services, and then we have to build all these services.
So before we are going to use BPEL, we have plenty of time to read and investigate how to use BPEL succesfull for our SOA. There are already lot of articles about this issue so we won’t have to be bored the coming months :-)