Process Patterns Overview

Flowset process diagraming support is both powerful and intentionally minimal. It's been stripped down to the most simple concepts, tailored to be expressive enough to support the high level of workflow processes possible with Flowset.

The underlying notation standard is based on Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), but there is no need to provide the full range of process diagraming notation. We have also taken some short cuts to avoid making the diagrams too verbose. Technically, given that we closely align with Zendesk ticketing concepts, the Flowset process diagraming is considered as a Domain-Specific Language (DSL).

You don't need to be a business analyst if you familiar enough with business flow diagrams, the process patterns discussed should be enough to get you going. A number of best-practice templates are also available within the configuration tool to provide quick-starts and inspiration.

Flowset uses just five shapes:

• Start & Stop (workflows)
• Activity (within a ticket) & Parallel Activity (within a sub-ticket)
• Join Gateway (directs parallelism)

All these shapes are connected together with Transition lines to enable a wide range of combinations. However, we can derive some fundamental patterns of use:

• Sequential Workflow Pattern - make use of one ticket broken down into a series of activities, executed as a sequence either linearly progressed or involving loopbacks. A ticket can only be on one specific activity at a time.
• Parallel Workflow Pattern - makes use of two or more tickets to support the ability to achieve parallel activities, typically used where more than one agent is involved.
• Combination Workflow Pattern - make use of both sequential and parallel patterns, as and when needed. The more sophisticated of which can involve sequentially progression on one part, while another is still being progressed, with eventual rejoining.
• Sub-process Pattern - enables an activity to be broken down into sub-activities, used in larger workflows where it's beneficial to provide more of a sense of where an activity fits within the overall process.

As such, the shapes and fundamental patterns provide the building blocks to assemble simple and complex workflow processes.