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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!"
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...