Business Process Modelling Software Evaluation

Later this trimester you will analyse and model a business process from a real organisation and then design improvements to it. The modelling will be done using a visual modelling language for representing processes called BPMN 2.0 (see Topic 5). Undertaking business process modelling and improvement requires appropriate modelling software. This assessment is intended to give you practical experience with evaluating software and also with report writing to document the evaluation process.

To do

To successfully complete this assignment, you should:

1. Read the Topic 8 material on software evaluation and acquisition. This will introduce you to the notions of evaluation criteria and the weighted score approach.

2. Investigate criteria that might be important in making a decision about which modelling software package to recommend.  You should consider what you will need to do to complete the modelling in the Business Process Management assignment (your 2^nd assignment) and also what has been written by others about selecting this kind of software.

3. Choose the set of criteria to be used in the evaluation (note: there must be at least 6). You will need to justify the choice of each criterion in your report.

4. Determine the relative importance of each of these criteria for choosing a tool to undertake the Business Process Management assignment (your 2^nd assignment). The outcome of this will be a relative weighting for each criterion.

5. Identify 3 possible modelling packages that support BPMN 2.0 – these will be your alternatives. Microsoft Visio should be one of them. You must be able to get access to all of them for the purposes of the evaluation – this could be by downloading a full copy (e.g. obtain Visio from Azure Dev Tools), obtaining a trial copy or getting permission to test it on someone else’s machine.

6. Use the weighted score method to evaluate your alternatives using the criteria and weightings you have specified. An Excel spreadsheet should be used to support the evaluation and identify which product has the highest ranking. This should use the variation of the weighted score method that includes raw scores and final scores for each criterion (see Topic 8 slides).

7. Determine which modelling software package you recommend.

8. Create a report based on your evaluation. This must follow the specified structure (see below).