Saturday, June 4, 2011

Process Diagrams

Process diagrams can be a very helpful tool to explain procedures. I've found many benefits to charting out even the most basic of systems:
  1. Having to describe the steps in detail and place them in proper sequence helps all the people involved identify inefficiencies and redundancies. No matter what the system is, you can't fix it until you can define it.
  2. A picture really is worth a thousand words. A couple of visuals can easily capture the most important points from pages of text describing a system.
  3. It's much easier to collaborate using a diagram than a document of text.
I've been evaluating a tool for creating and sharing process diagrams at gliffy.com.

The product works great so far. I've really only had one complaint and it's that you can't seem to change a shape type after it's created. The most important things for me are that you can share access and you can publish links to the most current version of a diagram. So I can link to the diagram directly from a KMX operational document even if the diagram is not complete. This mean that I don't need to go through the process of manually saving an image of a diagram and re-inserting it into my documentation every time it's changed or updated.