I've used Blueworks Live on a number of engagements.
It's especially nice for business process management, using process management and then transforming the identified tasks into a full business process.
The best part about Blueworks live is the collaboration capabilities. You can have a dozen people all sharing the screen, watching as you do your layout and helping the analyst capture details that they wouldn't have caught otherwise. For best results, us it interactively in conjunction with conference calls. In addition, you can have one person editing the pictures while someone else fills out the details in each process.
If you are then moving on to BPM, you can break the big process into smaller subprocesses and import them into BPM as the foundation for the implementation.
It's important to make sure that the client has enough reviewer licenses. These are relatively inexpensive, and when they can see the dynamic living document evolving, they often feel more aware of what is going on. You can also use the process diagrams to show status.
This is also a good place to store the documentation for each module, for example if you have the DDL for a database table that the process needs to access, you can include it as an attachment or paste the text into the descriptions in the details section.
This is a really great way to coordinate large complex tasks because you can identify the tasks - more importantly, you can isolate the business rules and the decision gateways which allows the user or designer to change the business rules, which values are relevant and how they are weighted and combined, from the actions taken based on the decisions.
Deborah Ballard - Sr IT Architect
IBM GBS BA&S Digital Operations