Ideas for Visualization of Work Flow Structure

[Deltadiver05]

Wanted to see if anyone had any ideas on how to visualize many different and interacting flows.  We have Management flows that are high level, discipline flows that are granular in nature, program flows that support many different discipline flows and a general flow that sits in front of the discipline flows (so we don't repeat the same 12 steps at the front of each discipline flow.... i.e. Job Safety Analysis must be conducted before any work is done, so it lives on the general flow).

I wanted to see if anyone knew of any sites out there that have done things like this.  I am looking for outside the box here.  I have some ideas, but I am not sure they are as good as they could be.

Thanks for any help or advice you can offer.

[iralevine]

I have similar situations in that I have Level 1, 2, and 3 flows (increasing detail at each level) as well as intersecting processes (i.e. New Hire processing integrates with payroll and training).  To prevent putting all the steps in one big flow i use one of two methods:

1.  For Presentations - I use the hyper link feature on a pre-defined process box to quickly acknowledge and highlight the points of intersection

2.  For Printouts - I use the predefined process box to link into the process and either use a comment box attached to it to highlight key steps or use icons to represent those steps


Hope this helps.

If you REALLY want outside the box, There is a pretty cool thing on the Microsoft Office Labs page that you could try if you REALLY want outside the box.  I used this a few weeks ago and it was way cool.

http://www.officelabs.com/pptplex

it is powerpoint based so i wound up dropping in the visios as image files to keep file size small (In Visio Edit>Select All>CTRL+C, in Powerpoint Edit>Paste Special>Device Independent Bitmap)  You lay out the end to end process steps and use this tool to create the core of the presentation.