Tag: personal process management

An Empirical Study on Simplification of Business Process Modeling Languages

by Marco Brambilla, posted in data science

Today I gave my presentation of our Empirical Study on Simplification of Business Process Modeling Languages at the Conference of Software Language Engineering, in Pittsburg, PA (co-located with Splash 2015).

You can find the full presentation here below, and some more details in this post by Eric Umuhoza on Jordi Cabot’s blog.

The work is based on the fact that the adaptation, specially by means of a simplification process, of modeling languages is a common practice due to the overwhelming complexity of most standard languages (like UML or BPMN), not needed for typical usage scenarios while at the same time companies don’t want to go to the extremes of defining a brand new domain specific language.

Unfortunately, there is a lack of examples of such simplification experiences that can be used as a reference for future projects. In this paper we report on a field study aimed at the simplification of a business process modeling language (namely, BPMN) for making it suitable to end users.

Our simplification process relies on a set of steps that encompass the selection of the language elements to simplify, generation of a set of language variants for them, measurement of effectiveness of the variants through user modeling sessions and extraction of quantitative and qualitative data for guiding the selection of the best language refinement, as shown here:

We describe the experimental setting, the output of the various steps of the analysis, and the results we obtained from users. Finally, we conclude with an outlook towards the generalization of the approach and consolidation of a language simplification method.
Out of this, you can also find an overview on how these results have been used by Fluxedo, a startup around a mobile app for social task planning.

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Fluxedo – your personal flow manager: model-driven strikes back for end users?

by Marco Brambilla, posted in data science

After months of intensive preparatory work, we are ready to announce a new initiative that starts from the model-driven engineering research but then targets end users: the upcoming mobile app called Fluxedo!

Fluxedo is a personal flow manager that allows you to easily create and share your tasks with friends and colleagues. Fluxedo lets you involve the people around you, keep up to date on the progress of the flow and reach your goals faster.
Fluxedo is based on the model-driven research on personal process management and aims at bringing it to the consumer market.
It is the result of a domain-specific modeling study for understanding the best way for describing processes from the consumer perspective.

You can read more on the fluxedo.com web site, but I can anticipate we already have a Alpha version of the app, and we plan to release the Beta version within the next 3-4 months. Aside, I’d like to mention that the project comes out from M.Sc. works at Politecnico di Milano and already won two startup challenges.
At this point though, I would like to ask a small action from your side:

.. and I know, it’s Valentine day, so I hope you get in love with this app!

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

Personal process management: the overlooked side of BPM

by Marco Brambilla, posted in Uncategorized

Being quite involved both in the BPM field and in social networking, personal productivity tools, and Web application design, I’m always appalled when I think about how many findings and practices designed for businesses could benefit our everyday life too.
One specific example of this is about the BPM practices and their potential added value for end users.
With the advent of Web 2.0 and online social interactions, people started sharing thoughts, contents and tasks online. This evolved to cover also socialization of task management, which is currently supported by a plethora of online services directed to the final user (for instance, see: RememberTheMilk or Astrid).
First, I tried to build a list of features they cover, and that’s what I obtained:

As you see, they all provide plenty of features, with some diversification among each other. However, all these tools share a common weakness: they don’t provide any way for structuring the interactions, dependencies or constraints between tasks.

Based on this consideration, I thought about a vision towards the application of BPM techniques and tools to personal task management. The challenge of this is finding the appropriate level of complexity of processes: obviously one cannot expose the full complexity of BP modeling languages to end users. The language for modeling such processes should be complete enough for describing basic processes but also simple enough to let people understand, accept and use them in their everyday life. Therefore, I’m proposing to strip off some of the expressive power of enterprise business processes, so as to accommodate end user needs and acceptance.

I presented a paper at the BPMS2 workshop on Business Process Management and Social Software at the BPM conference on this. The slides are available on slideshare and reported below.
If you are interested, you can read the full paper here (scroll to the bottom of the page and download the PDF).

To my understanding neither the commercial tool nor the academic community (except for some work done by Michael Rosemann, reflected only in a one-year-old short post) is addressing the issue.
Feel free to comment and propose extensions or changes! This is just a first attempt in the direction of personal process management (but already supported by a prototype implementation, see the video attached to the slides or available on youTube!).

A demonstration video of our tool is on YouTube:

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).