Behavioural View discovery intermediate

BPMN Process Diagram

A business process as tasks in swim lanes with explicit decision points and handoffs, where crossing a lane boundary is the interesting event.

Greenfield Build Regulatory Remediation Merger & Acquisition Integration Cloud-Agnostic Insurance Banking & Payments Cross-Industry CxO Engineering Architecture Review Board

flowchart LR
  subgraph cust["Customer"]
    direction TB
    c1(["Submits claim"])
  end
  subgraph intake["Intake — automated"]
    direction TB
    a1["Validate policy"]
    a2{"Policy active<br/>and in cover?"}
    a3["Auto-assess<br/><i>rules + model</i>"]
    a4{"Confidence<br/>&ge; threshold?"}
  end
  subgraph handler["Claims Handler"]
    direction TB
    h1["Manual review"]
    h2{"Approve?"}
  end
  subgraph fin["Finance"]
    direction TB
    p1["Schedule payment"]
  end

  c1 --> a1 --> a2
  a2 -->|"no"| r1(["Reject — notify with reason"])
  a2 -->|"yes"| a3 --> a4
  a4 -->|"yes"| p1
  a4 -->|"no"| h1 --> h2
  h2 -->|"yes"| p1
  h2 -->|"no"| r2(["Decline — notify with appeal route"])
  p1 --> e1(["Paid"])

What it is

The business process with lanes for who does each step. The two things it carries that a flowchart does not are ownership — every task sits in somebody's lane — and handoffs, which are the lane crossings and therefore where delay, error and blame accumulate.

When you produce it

When automating or re-designing a process, and when a regulator asks how a decision is made. In regulated lines, a process diagram showing where a model decides and where a human decides is increasingly a compliance artifact rather than a design one.

Who reads it

Operations and the business, who must recognise their own work in it. Engineers building the workflow. Compliance, checking that the human review is real.

What good looks like

Every task in exactly one lane, with a real owner.
Decision diamonds have exhaustive labelled outcomes, including the unhappy one.
Automated and human steps are visually distinguishable — the example separates them by lane.
Exception paths are drawn. A process with only the straight-through path documents the ten percent of volume that never needed help.

Common mistakes

Drawing the intended process rather than the one that happens. Walk it with the people who do it.
No lanes, which loses the entire point.
Skipping the rework loops. They are where the cost is.