Slashdot Mirror
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!"
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
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.
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"?
We don't know he doesn't use a CASE system. The OP mentioned that his process is:
- go to client site
- lern workflow, take notes on it
- at end of day, go back to hotel and push things into a format for developers (which may or may be CASE/ UML)
The OP, I think, is really asking something along the lines of "I get tons of info thrown at me by non technical people and need to feed it into some other system to make my programmers happy. Who knows a way of accepting tons of semi-structured, possibly random, and always interrelated data so it can be rearragned and cut up into bite size pieces for some other formalized system without making my eyes bleed?"
I think the two best suggestions here have been:
- Wiki (perhaps not only for you, but for the end client as well, so they can see exactly what you're taking back to your programmers and fix mistakes and add details before it goes out)
- Treenode.. never heard of it, but sounds useful.
One thing that has not come up yet is what you do with your client before you show up at their site. If you're getting *that* much info per-client I betcha that you could come up with a standardized set of questions for them to answer before you even step on a plane. That should reduce your onsite workload and allow you to better grasp their workflow while onsite.
Maybe you already do this...
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
Well, I'm certainly an "educated analyst" going back to the days when "GOTO considered harmful" was the cutting edge and from the question I infer with near-100 percent certainty that you're not one. You may be educated, but you've certainly never had to perform an actual meet people in their offices and ask questions analysis task.
i nd+mapping&btnG=Google+Search for some examples) to build up a picture of the information.
You don't develop preconditions, use CASE tools, or define formal workflows in those sessions; you do that after days or weeks of asking questios, accumulating data, and making vague sketches on whiteboards. Before you can do a brilliant analysis, you've got to know something to be brilliant about.
Now, having disposed of that, I'd say that you may not be running into a computer tools problem as much as you're running into an intellectual tools problem. Personally, I find the linear notes on a page model to be badly bandwidth-limited; for that kind of analysis, I like to use a big drawing pad (like this one, except Office Max sells one with half-inch quadrille I like better, but it's not on their web site for some reason) and many colors of pen and highlighter.
I use them to accumulate a series of "mind maps" (see http://www.google.com/search?complete=1&hl=en&q=m
Label each page on a consistent edge with date and time in a consistent format; AFTER the session is done, write some keywords on an orthogonal edge of the paper to remind yourself what the session told you.