Micheal Hugos wrote:

Process mapping is a great technique for an agile BA to use to illustrate existing business workflows and combine ideas from many different people to design new workflows because it uses a graphic diagram format (instead lots of text) and is easily understood by business and technical people.

Tony Markos responds:

A very important consideration is missing here. An article just previous to yours on Modern Analysis.com stated that, in Agile projects, the BA needs to up-front perform a high-level analysis to arrive at a "high-level roadmap". (This analysis is used as the primary input to a variety of subsequent Agile tasks, such as system scoping and requirements priortization for Agile iterations.)

Problem: Process mapping typically refers to flow diagrams that are primarily based upon flow of control/flow of sequence. Howevr, at higher levels, both manual and automated systems, especially other than smallish ones, are characterized as potentially having many processes happening at the same time and processes that can happen in any order. Such behavior makes it almost impossible to use typical process mapping techniques to document systems at higher levels of abstraction as there is no defined sequence or set flow of control.

FYI: I myself relly upon data flow diagrams to capture such behavior.

Bottom Line: Traditional process mapping techniques are not appropriate for the all important up-front "big picture" analysis required on Agile projects. They may, however, be appropriate for the more detail-level analysis done during the subsequent iterative development cycles.

Tony Markos