In my experience(YMMV) with trying to use BPMN to make inroads into automating workflows at a small financial authority, I had to reduce it to an extremely small subset even just to get business stakeholders to look at the models. The only ones who were assigned to actually help me create the models were the most-spareable, least-knowledgeable people in the organization who pretty much only used a subset reduced to ANDs, ORs, and XORs, and after months, still didn't consistently understand the difference between ORs and XORs. The ability (or even the earnest attempt) to use the symbols correctly had absolutely no relation to the enthusiasm any individual showed towards using heavily marketed tools promising automated execution.
So basically, I was assigned the least knowledgeable people to work on models, and I had to spend an order of magnitude more time redoing their work than they spent doing it. In the end we had a big beautiful graph that no one could verify was accurate in any way except me by describing sections in plain English during the 20 minute meetings I could sometimes wrangle out of the people who knew the business side well enough to give me a plain English answer that was interpreted by me and added to the giant unverifiable graph.
Really a horrible experience all around. And at the beginning of the project, I really thought BPMN looked nice. Of course, I looked at it like a programmer:)
So basically, I was assigned the least knowledgeable people to work on models, and I had to spend an order of magnitude more time redoing their work than they spent doing it. In the end we had a big beautiful graph that no one could verify was accurate in any way except me by describing sections in plain English during the 20 minute meetings I could sometimes wrangle out of the people who knew the business side well enough to give me a plain English answer that was interpreted by me and added to the giant unverifiable graph.
Really a horrible experience all around. And at the beginning of the project, I really thought BPMN looked nice. Of course, I looked at it like a programmer:)