Business Process Flows: The BA’s Swiss Army Knife

A while back, I was chatting with a colleague who casually mentioned they hadn’t used a business process flow in years – and almost couldn’t remember how to create one. I was intrigued, to say the least – how were they eliciting their requirements?

To me, the business process flow is one of the most powerful items in the BA toolbox. It creates so much value in such a simple way.

In my experience, over 80% of business requirements can be elicited with a well-crafted process flow. By mapping out roles, steps, decisions, and hand-offs, you not only capture the core functionality but also spark conversations about edge cases, error handling, reporting, security (think RBAC), response times, volumes, etc.

Process flows aren’t just a requirements tool. They’re invaluable for change management and training, and operations teams love receiving a fully-documented process as part of hand-over, especially if their current documentation suite is patchy or long-lost.

I don’t obsess over strict BPMN 2.0 compliance. If it’s an organisational standard, of course I use it – but I’ve yet to meet a business stakeholder who knew or cared about formal notation. My approach is to keep it simple – swimlanes, decisions, forks and joins. The goal is to make it easy for stakeholders to focus on the work. Clarity above all.

And clarity often arrives in surprising ways. I once worked on a project where the business believed the warehouse team was handling orders in a certain way. When we mapped out the As-Is process, we discovered the warehouse was actually doing something very different – with a number of “interesting” implications. That simple diagram not only resolved confusion and reduced exposure to the organisation, it also justified an increased budget for the warehouse team. This wasn’t the goal of the project, and it was an unexpected bonus for all concerned. It’s a great example of how process flows don’t just document reality – they can also reveal it.

To me, business process flows are the Swiss Army knife of the BA toolkit – simple, flexible, and endlessly useful. I can’t imagine doing my job without them.

Do you love process flows as much as I do? Or do you have a different go-to tool?