I was reading a Gartner report on “Predicts 2011: PPM Goes From Managing Projects to
Managing Value and Change” (PPM is project and portfolio management – never eactly sure why it is considered separate from BPM, but that is another issue. Maybe we should try to understand why people don’t use BPM for PPM…).

It had a chart about the certainty of requirements – which led me to think about BPM projects and the certainty of requirements. In many BPM engagements, discovering the model of existing process is a large part of the project. Once the model exists, that is when the rest of a BPM suite is brought to bear. So in many ways the BPMN (or other notation) is the equivalent of requirements. That led me to the following chart (the way I believe most BPM suites view the world):

I believe that most real world processes actually look like:

Real world process requirements (especially in today’s modern economy) are lot more uncertain than BPMS vendors would like people to think.