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Animated Flowcharts

 Run 'What-if' Scenarios in flowcharts to see how well you've though things through
 
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Businesses use flowcharts to help their organization. They are there to help plan for every contingency, and make sure that someone is responsible for handling everything.

But, flowcharts have two problems:

1. They have a weird symbol system that takes a while to learn.

2. They are static.

I propose a computer program where you make flowcharts that have actual people, documents, etc. instead of weird symbols. Of course, you need some symbols to represent abstract things like email, but even simple icons are better than symbols like triangles and parallelograms.

Then, when you think you have your plan pretty well down pat, run a couple of what if scenarios. What if the secretary never sends out the invoice? What if the shipping manager is 15 days late sending out a package? Do these issues get silently dropped, or does someone become aware of them and take action?

Then when you see problems arise, you can add more to your flowchart to help organize yourselves.

—lawpoop, Aug 21 2003

ProcessModel http://www.pcworld....e/0,aid,9848,00.asp
Animated Flowcharts and what-if situations. Expensive, though. [Cedar Park, Oct 04 2004]


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Annotation:







       Baked. [link]
—Cedar Park, Aug 21 2003
   

       Sounds a bit like an idea, "Video modeling of business logic," posted on here not too long ago by . . . [lawpoop], of all people.
—bristolz, Aug 22 2003
   

       Yeah. No one really got it, so this is like version 2. I hope I've made myself clearer.
—lawpoop, Aug 22 2003
   

       Can the processes have little three-fingered white-gloved hands?
—Trodden, Aug 22 2003
   

       I do that all the time in MS Excel for throughput optimization of machines.
—kbecker, Aug 22 2003
   

       Maybe the UML Activity Diagram is what you seek.
—bristolz, Aug 22 2003
   

       [jutta] You have to strike the right balance between specifity and generity. I think my system does that.   

       I'll I'm proposing is replacing geometic shapes, which are meaningless and totally unintuitive to the uninitiated, with symbols or icons that are more intuitive. Like instead of an obtuse parallelogram (quick -- what it is?), a little document icon with words on it, meaning "computer data".   

       Without knowing You might guess that it's some kind of information, and you're pretty darn close.   

       Of course you don't want a specific movie of Dan Karlson receiving shipment #1002323 from Debra the UPS person on Oct 12th 2001 9:43 pm, but I think "Shipping manager receieves package
—lawpoop, Aug 22 2003
   


 

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