Commentary
In the world of Business Analysis there is a discipline called Process Modelling. Its output would be familiar to most people, consisting of diagrams to show how a business process, like say fulfilling an order, is supposed to work. As a discipline it strives for clarity and simplicity, through a complex syntax and method, and can be hard to learn, and easy to botch.
One of the common mistakes novices make is to assume they know what a customer, or other external party, will do in response to some message or instruction from the company. Pictorially, the customer is often wrongly represented as one of a number of “swim lanes” in a “pool” depicting the roles each department plays in a given business process….