Friday, 24 January 2014

How to Design a Process Flow Chart

Hi Everyone,

In this blog series of Skills for 2014 #GettingRelevant, we shall be engaging ourselves on how to remain relevant in the workplace and adding valuable skills that will propel us to greatness in our chosen fields.
Today, we shall be examining how to design process flow charts in its basic form. A process in an organization is an activity carried out by a unit to bring about a desired outcome. So, as you’ll agree we have many processes in an organization that eventually leads to the desired outcome in form of products and services. There are industry-certifications dealing with process creation, improvement and optimization like Lean and Six Sigma – you can Google and read more.
First step in creating your flowchart is sketching it on a piece of paper, indicating both the start and end positions. Then you decide on which tool to use – Visio, SmartDraw, Word or Excel. We will make use of MS Visio.
In this guide, we will examine a process flowchart for a network implementation. This process has steps defined which are listed in order: Conduct a Needs Analysis and establish Business Case, Management Approval, Technical Site Survey, Gather Requirements, Network Planning and Design, Document Bill of Materials, Project Management/Implementation Plan, Execute, Evaluate Objectives/Optimize and Closing.
Let’s Begin: In your design you need to understand what each flowchart shape means. These are examples of flowchart shapes. So depending on each step of your design will determine what shape to drag to the work area.




So, after listing out your flowchart steps then start dragging the shapes into the work area.



You can use the tools provided in Visio to add text, connectors etc to your chart



After all the adds, deletes, and everything our flowchart diagram will look as follows:



There are tonnes of simple as well as complex designs available online that can help you to come up with a professional flowchart for your software, engineering and other administrative use.
Hope this little information will propel you to take on this skill and add value to yourself.
For ideas and contributions mail me sonde.damilol@gmail.com


0 comments:

Post a Comment