Changing Element Types

Now that we’ve covered the basics, I have this sample process.

In the real world, designing processes is more of an ongoing cycle:  Building, then testing and monitoring them, and revising — so it’s necessary to know how to go back and change things, adding complexity to your models.

In this video I will start showing you how to evolve your processes from something simply visual to something that can become executable.

In this example, I only used the abstract task as a placeholder.  I can now go back and make them more specific.

The two main intermediate tasks are here.

The service task, which is used for a step that will be automated,

and the human task where an actual person is responsible for carrying out the step.

First let’s say the task “get beans” will have to be done by someone so let’s change it to a human task.  I select it,

and now I can go down to the general details panel and select “human” from the drop down list.

This adds a little person to the top left corner of the task to indicate its type.

Another way to do this is select a task, then click the small “tools” icon to the bottom left.  And this allows me to change its type from within the same window.

There.

Some steps in your process will be done automatically.  We can indicate this by changing them to the service task.

Select the task you wish to change, then select “service” from the drop down in the general panel.

Or, once again select the tools from the bottom left of the task and then select the small gears.

It will now be indicated as a service task as those gears are put in the top left corner of the task.

Next, I need to change my gateway as I currently have the wrong one for my purpose.

Gateways are like crossroads for your data, where flows split off or converge within your process.

The two main gateways are here:

The parallel gateway, also known as the AND gateway, has a plus sign,

this is used is when you want to receive all inputs before continuing,

or send out multiple outputs to different events in parallel.

But for my example I will be using the Exclusive gateway, also known as the XOR gateway which is pictured with an X.

This is used when you want to be exclusive, using one input or one output.  If there are several flowing into it, only one is needed to continue,

and it will only send out one output as well.

In my case this is the gateway I would like as I am just asking a yes or no question.

I can change the gateway in either of the same two ways, but I will use the tools since they are a little quicker.

Once done you will notice that a small red X appears indicating an error.  This is normal for right now and I will show you how to fix this in our next video.