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!"

Comments

An outliner can be your friend

[treerex]

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.

Not sure if this will help, just some ideas.

[rusty0101]

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