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The Analysis of Workflow Analysis?
ziploclogic asks: "Much of my days are taken up performing workflow analysis for courts. For the past few years I have worked for a company implementing their off-the-shelf Integrated Court Management system. While our products are among the best in the industry, I find it difficult to keep my analysis notes organized. The judicial process can vary greatly from state to state as well as from county to county. As to be expected, not one court has been a 100% match to our software. This leads to hours of spec writing for programming changes that must be derived from my notes. Keeping my information organized so that I can prepare said specifications and training plans prove to be a nightmare at times. I have tried one solution that seems to work well for my humble web design company where I send myself gMails with specific keywords in the subject line. This provides for sorting and [later] message retrieval. However, I can leave a court with notebooks [plural] full of workflow analysis notes that I have to decipher in the evenings. I would be interested to learn how others keep their analysis notes organized, especially when working with multiple clients and with multiple [individuals] departments within those clients. Thanks!"
I find that keeping outlines really helps. If I am using my TiBook then this is usually done in OmniOutliner, though I'm not averse to using Outline Mode in Emacs if I need to share these with others not using Mac OS X. For me being able to categorize my ideas in a hierarchical manner is a Good Thing. In times long gone I used to use Symantec's "MORE II", then UserLand's Frontier... outlines have been a consistent part of my design process.
You can also find good outliners for Palmtops as well, though it has been years since I installed one and I cannot remember the name of the one I used.
Get a laptop and create a folder for each court.
Take notes using your computer and save them into the appropriate folder. That eliminates the "scrawl" problem.
If you're going to visit the court many times, include the date in your file name.
If you have the need to do a lot of diagrams, this is one instance where a tablet PC or equivalent might be useful. I normally don't like them, but I'm the type of guy who can't read what he's scribbled five minutes after doing the scribbling.
Hope that helps.
D
Most of the MS Office tools allow you to save meta informaiton in the ile Properties dialog. It would be nice if this could be automatically filled in based upon the content of the file, but even then you would have to tidy it up.
Obviously there are a few desktop search tools available to use for keeping track of this information.
If you are using Oo.o instead of MSOfice, you should find the same capabilities for saving meta information.
Another option is to set up a 'keyword' field within documents that you are creating in ordinary text editors. Or set up a template that you use for each applicaiton with fields specifically for various meta information.
Some others will point out that you should be using some xml to keep track of this. No argument, just haven't used it so can't advocate it.
You may also want to create an index.html file in each directory you keep specific customer files in, where you document the keywords that are appropriate for that customer. Obviously those keywords should appear somewhere in the content files for those customers as well, otherwise it will be of little help.
I believe that Google sells an Intranet server that you can use to index your internal documents and internal users only would have access to those documents.
I am reasonably sure that there are other search tools available, WAIS, plugins for ZOPE, etc. that may help you as well.
The worst part of keeping track of documents is that somewhere along the line someone is going to forget about updating the kewords in a file as it is copied into a new directory for a different customer. For some time after that, the indexes will bring up the wrong file with a keyword search. This will ultimately be fixed when someone finds that file while looking for something else, and realizes what needs to be fixed, and corrects it for you. Then you have to wait for the document to be re-indexed. Versioning will probably create a few problems with that as well.
Good luck.
-Rusty
You never know...
Try a lightweight tablet pc and microsoft onenote. Add on google's search utility and you'd have it all.
Check out Treepad.
You make a tree in the left-hand pane to orgranize the contents in the right-hand pane. The contents can be text you type or paste in, links to files, links to other nodes in the tree, Web links, etc.
The contents are also searchable so you can find things that cut across the hierarchy you've created. To make your notes available to others, there is a free viewer you can give to people, or you can also export to a website. The exported website includes a javascript tree so it can be navigated the same as the program.
There is s free version for both Windows and Linux that may do everything you need. I use the 'Business' edition that has more features and was less than $50.
Sorry, but I wonder that such a question wents through the submission process ...
Are you an educated analyst? I wonder how you do your analysis? I mean, you only make "verbal notes" in "text files"?
What about doing activity diagrams (or flowcharts)? With every activity having an entry condition (precondition in UML) and a goal/result (postcondition in UML)?
You would use a CASE system for that like "Enterprise Architect" (googel for it, its about $200 and beats tools like Rational Rose by far). Depending on how you like to run it, you can have a central database at your company and a replica on your notebook. Either for every customer you make a individual project, or you have one single big project for your companies product and make subfolders for each customer inside of it.
If you don't use a CASE system (or something similar but more specialized to your needs) you are wasting your time.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Well, my work probably isn't as complicated as yours, but when I'm collecting notes for conceptual modeling and workflow analysis, I'm just collecting reams of textual data with the occasional graphic thrown in. And as I collect this data I need to reorganize it, group it, hammer it into a kind of hierarchy. In fact, most requirements documents seem to be hierarchical in nature, no matter what they are for.
And for this purpose I can't imagine using anything but an outliner. Specifically, OmniOutliner 3 is what I've been using lately. Not only does it totally rock as an outliner, but you can adjust a few settings, use a couple nice fonts, and get a very nice printed document or PDF out of it.. if you're using OmniOutliner 2 and you haven't tried the beta of 3 DO IT TODAY IT IS AWESOME.
Okay I don't mean to plug OO3 but if you took away my outliner I wouldn't be able to work! Get a laptop with an outliner and use that to take your notes. Put a copy out on your office or 2nd machine occasionally as well for safekeeping (voice of experience here, heh).
I use Instiki for my notes and can't live without it. Because it's a Wiki I can create WikiWords that force me to flesh out stuff that I might otherwise overlook. If you have a Mac or Linux the installation is super-simple, not sure how hard it is on Windows.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Is that related to "The Department of Redundancy Department"?
I find it is always the people who are well organized who worry about how well organized they are.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Wikis are great for this. You can organize on the fly, interlink between topics, and edit quickly. I coerced my company into implementing a wiki for all of our stuff, and I have one installed on my laptop for my own notes. We use the same software as Wikipedia - it's free and easy to use.
I once had a job trying to routinize software production (don't laugh yet). Every workflow tool we tried !required! that we do things the way the tool wanted them done. Even tho the suppliers claimed that the tool could be customized, when all was said and done, the tool could not be made flexible enough.
We ended up writing our own tool. (Laugh now) None of the managers were interested; none of the programmers were interested even tho the project promised to handle a lot of routine paperwork automatically.
This was ten years ago. Are contemporary workflow tools any better?
Regards,
Bill
Therefore, I think I need to ask the question: how do we analyze our analysis of workflow analysis?
Make a sticky to remind yourself to get organized