Flowchart = Flowchart+Chart.

Process: Process refers to a series of operations with a specific logical relationship carried out by a specific subject in order to meet specific needs, and the process naturally exists. But it can be irregular, unstable and full of problems. So there seems to be no process.

Figure: The chart or diagram is to visualize and write the basic curing process with certain rules, which is conducive to the spread of precipitation and the reference of process reorganization.

As can be seen from the definition, as long as there are things and tasks, there will be processes, but not all processes are suitable to be represented by flowcharts. The process that is suitable to be represented by flowchart is fixed and regular to a certain extent, and the key links in the process will not change frequently.

● Participants: Who is in this process? It can be a system, it can be a printer, and it refers to more roles-usually people who are engaged in a certain kind of work. For example, there are two customers, Xiao A and Xiao B, but if their work nature is exactly the same, then write a customer service role in the flow chart.

● Activity: What did you do, such as ordering food and checking out?

● Order: What is the order of these things, and which task is the premise of other tasks? For example, if a guest doesn't check out, there will be no activity to send him a discount card.

● Input: The start of each activity depends on what kind of input or data. For example, when a chef starts cooking, he needs to get a specific menu.

● Output: After each activity, what kind of documents or data will be input and passed on to the next party, such as how to let the person in charge of food delivery know that the dishes have been cooked by the chef?

● Standardization: Use a set of standardized symbols to convey your flow chart so that the audience can understand it faster.

Common flowcharts include transaction flow and page flow.

At work, as UED, you may find that PD often talks about business processes, while as interaction designers, we make more page flow charts. What is the relationship between page flow chart and business flow chart? Who will come first and who will come next?

Let's tell a story first: Suppose your dream is to open a high-end national chain restaurant, then the first thing you should think about is not how to choose a location, but why you want to open a chain restaurant, as well as your positioning and core competitiveness. Is it fast food, or ordering food, chain or joining? Is it located in a residential area or a bustling business district? Is it Sichuan cuisine or Jiangsu and Zhejiang seafood? Is it aimed at middle-aged people or young people? Is it a family theme or an anime theme? Who are the competitors? What kind of investment is needed? What are the possible risks? All these have been thought clearly, and the questions have been answered. The so-called strategic level should be clear. So suppose you analyze it now and decide a direction with the main investors: a fashionable cartoon tea restaurant for young people, a chain, but the first one is opened in Hangzhou, which is located in the area where young people gather to sweep the streets, such as scenic spots, famous business districts, next to cinemas and so on. What's next?

The next step is to find a way to achieve this goal, right? So what needs to be done? Site selection? Pull investment? Decoration? Choose a catering menu? Hire employees? How to do each step and when to do it? Task decomposition and planning, etc. Need to go to the tactical level.

The implementation of these things, always need to please people? First of all, the core team deployed various construction tasks in a division of labor. The opening of the restaurant needs to organize a stable operation team, such as service, sanitation, kitchen, procurement, personnel and so on. There is also a division of labor in the kitchen, such as white cases, hot dishes and cold dishes. Do departments need to establish management and reporting relationships? So your organizational structure was born.

So how do all the roles smoothly cooperate to complete the daily stable and unexpected tasks? For example, when customers come to the door, who will guide the guests to sit down and who will order? How can the ordering information be quickly transmitted to the kitchen and distributed to the wine room, cold dish room and hot dish room? And ensure that guests can eat their own dishes as soon as possible? You have to consider the cooperation process of various people and optimize efficiency, so the business process appears.

Human flesh has been in operation for some time, and you can find it is ok without any ordering system. When the guest orders, the waiter writes down the guest's requirements by hand. Because there is copy paper, the waiter can send the copy to the kitchen and write down the table number at the same time. The kitchen is very small, and the staff responsible for assigning tasks look at the menu, write down what they need to deal with on the blackboard in the cold dish area, run to the blackboard in the hot dish area and write down the dishes that need to be dealt with, and go to the wine room to report their names. However, with the expansion of business, there are many problems in the above-mentioned methods of eating people. First of all, the efficiency of manual copying is too low, customers frequently change dishes, and the response is too late, which leads to manual copying mistakes and often leads to wrong dishes. The kitchen is in a mess, so we have to hire more people to run errands. Once the customer wants to add food, it is even more troublesome to withdraw. They need to find out what they ordered at that time, and then manually mark the changes. At the same time, they need to modify the blackboard at the back of the kitchen. ...

So you want to develop an intelligent system to replace a lot of human work. You hired a system development team. After evaluation, they judged that the system can solve the problem from ordering to serving. The handheld terminal can quickly transmit the customer's ordering requirements to the printer, and the printing system can automatically print the order according to the customer's ordering type, so that the hot food room can see its own hot food menu, the cold food room can see its own cold food menu, and the wine room can see the hotel menu. Send it out when it's ready. The food delivery staff can deliver the food according to the name of the food and the printed documents, and check it according to the customer's order receipt. At the same time, this system must be equipped with a settlement system to transmit the final confirmed menu and consumer price to the settlement front desk, which is convenient for the cashier to operate quickly.

This system is ultimately to be displayed, so how to design the interface of the handheld terminal? Can the waiter click less to complete the order of a dish? How to design the interface of the settlement center?

Through the above story, do you better understand the relationship from strategy, tactics, business flow chart to page flow chart? To sum up:

● First of all, there is a business need and business goal, that is, what is our vision? (strategy)

Then came what tasks we need to break down and how to implement tactics. (Tactics)

● So, which departments and positions need to be structured to work together? (organizational structure)

Then there is a business process in which different departments cooperate to complete a task? (business process)

● After the business process is basically stable, efficiency optimization is often considered, so a system will be born to support the process, reduce human flesh links and promote data collection (system vision).

● In order to design this system, PD needs to think about what functions can replace a certain link of human flesh work (functional requirements, system flow).

● No matter what kind of function will be presented in the form of interface, designers will pay attention to the user's task flow and behavior path in the system, so that users can complete tasks more efficiently and happily. (page flow)

Of course, besides business processes, we also pay attention to system processes, page processes and data processes.

In our daily work, we often hear people talk about the concepts of swimming lane map, task flow chart and so on. What's the relationship?

At work, we can often see two kinds of business flow charts. From the form of expression, there is one that is well distinguished, commonly known as "lane map", which really looks like a lane, with horizontal lanes and vertical lanes. In some documents, the swimlane diagram will be called "flow chart with activity as the unit", and all activities floating in the swimlane are activities.

Swim lane diagram has several key points: two dimensions, activity flow and process elements.

The other is a flow chart with departments and positions as units. The circle in the figure below represents each department or post. The rectangle represents the activity. This kind of flow chart pays attention to the logic of how to do things, but it is weak in reflecting the responsibilities of various departments. If you are a person in a certain position, it is difficult to see the responsibilities and tasks of your department at a glance like a swimming lane map. So it's used less now.

The flow chart can provide a simple and clear "bird's eye view" to help the audience quickly understand how the business works. It contains several key words: who, when, under what conditions, what was done, what was input, what was output, and to whom. ...

Different from system process, business process pays more attention to how the business itself works, tells business stories and contains business rules. The system process is to satisfy the business process and realize the informationization and systematization of some or all processes.

Therefore, business process is the premise of all links-software requirements analysis, information system construction will also sort out business processes first.

The following shows how business process diagrams work in three main scenarios:

1, training

In this case, the flowchart can provide a quick view of how the business works. Through the flow chart, new employees can quickly understand what the ultimate goal of the enterprise is, which roles are involved, their responsibilities and their relationships.

In addition to training new employees, employees also need to refer to the business flow chart in the scene of employee rotation and transfer to understand how and where the new work is carried out, who are their upstream and downstream, and what work needs to be delivered.

2. Process optimization and reorganization

The existence of business process reengineering can be clearly refuted: existence is reasonable. In fact, the existing business processes are unreasonable. It may be that many participants are accustomed to a certain practice, it may be that the change has not affected the terminal operation, or it may be that they lack insight into the running business process problems and strong promotion of the change-because it is not a matter for a certain department to promote the business process change, but it requires the full cooperation of all departments in the process.

More often, business process optimization is top-down, but bosses may not know the actual business process so well. Business process diagram can well represent this "operation mode". By looking at the business flow chart and looking for people at key nodes to visit, we can directly cut into: why do you want to do this, why not do it? So as to explore deeper problems, instead of asking: what do you do now?

By investigating and analyzing the business process diagram and introducing more roles, we can analyze the problems existing in the current business process: lack, duplication, risk, efficiency and so on. So as to formulate the corresponding optimization scheme.

3, the basis of information technology

Just like the case of restaurant dream mentioned above, one task of information system is to liberate employees' hands and feet and replace some repetitive human labor. After the system is installed, it is not without business processes, but after some adjustments, one of the participants becomes a system, or a handheld device, or a printer.

Then, when designing the functions and processes of the system, is it necessary to understand how the business is currently operating? So as to better analyze and explain which part of the system has replaced what type of human flesh work?

So the PRD we see often starts with the business flow chart. When describing the benefits of a system construction, we can also compare the previous business process with the business process after the system is installed. According to the analysis, the function points of the new business flow chart in the future need to be clearly written.

First of all, is there a process to draw the business flow chart itself? There must be. When you hear a word in software engineering, everything is an object. Then in process science, everything is a process. Isn't there a process for eating? As far as eating is concerned, there is a process: taking chopsticks-taking vegetables-eating-chewing-swallowing.

So, is there a process to follow when drawing a business flow chart? I suggest that we can start with the following four steps.

1, investigation

How to quickly understand the truth of enterprise management? Are there any research techniques that can be broadcast?

2, combing and presenting

Can you quickly turn the words and questions obtained from the investigation into business flow charts?

What is the standard diagram of business process diagram?

How to evaluate the quality of a business flow chart?

3. Check and confirm-can the business flow chart truly reflect the real business?

4. File maintenance-how can the business flow chart respond quickly when the process is constantly changing?

Before drawing a business flow chart, it should not be important to think about how exquisite, how to interact and what tools to use.

The real point is to collect the key elements of the business process diagram. Please try to answer the following questions clearly, or don't start drawing a flowchart:

In addition to the questions at the beginning of this part, the research process also solved the questions of who, what, why, how and where: who did what, under what circumstances, what preconditions did this thing need, what was exported, and where was this thing completed? If we understand these problems, our research can be successfully completed.

The performance of the flowchart should answer these questions:

1, who-who? Department, role, position

2. What's this?

3. Where-where was it made? On the business flow chart I combed, there is more of a document or various systems to express the degree of informatization. For example, when we find that a registration is made by excel instead of the business system, then where here can be expressed as: excel document.

4. Document-What is the name of this document? Also wrote, on behalf of the file transfer, and if information transfer is to be carried out in the future, this human flesh file also needs to be eliminated and replaced by the system. (On the contrary, if this job is operated in a certain system, where can it be written as "personnel system" and the document can continue to exist, that is, the name of the form in this system: "employee registration form")

5. conditions-conditions. Under this condition, the next activity can continue, that is, the input and output of an activity are represented by logical link lines, and the arrow pointing to an activity indicates the pre-input condition of this activity.

6. decision-making. Some activities will produce a conditional judgment, and different branching processes will be taken according to different judgment results. For example, when entering employee information, you can choose different processes according to whether the employee has been employed before. For those who are already employed, you can choose the previous job number without generating a new job number.

Give an example (please forgive me if it is not appropriate). Suppose you are ordered to investigate the business processes of two restaurants in order to provide them with the most cost-effective ordering system.

In the survey:

You can ask someone who is proficient in business processes to explain the system to you first.

Investigate the specific operator and verify whether his explanation to you is comprehensive and biased.

On-site observation and recording (take the time to walk through the business process)

These three methods are combined with each other. The first method allows you to establish a systematic point of view and understand the general branches, but it is difficult to cut into the details that may go wrong. The second method relies too much on the quality of the question and the scene of the question. Many incorrect conclusions are actually due to asking the wrong person or asking the wrong question. Then you need to use the third method to verify it in observation.

Among these problems, it involves several activities such as dividing vegetables, cutting vegetables, selecting vegetables, cooking, passing vegetables, serving food, and the roles of waiter, chef, assistant, knife worker, and passing food. The sequence of several activities is also relatively clear.

Maybe the chef didn't understand the following question, so he had to ask the ordering staff.

Your research and observation have given you the raw materials for cooking.

Is the next task very simple? Yes, it's as simple as filling in the blanks. Fill activities/events into the framework determined by departments and time according to certain rules.

This stage is paper work, and you need to present the original data collected in the research stage in a more intuitive and clear way. In order to better evaluate and confirm. It also prepares for future process review and optimization.

It is impossible to present all the activities in one picture.

"Business processes are hierarchical, and this level is reflected in the logical relationship from top to bottom, from whole to part, from macro to micro, from abstract to concrete. This hierarchical relationship conforms to people's thinking habits and is conducive to the establishment of enterprise business model and hierarchical relationship table between enterprise departments. Generally speaking, we can first establish the overall operation process of major business processes (including the grand strategy of the whole enterprise), then refine each activity and implement it in the business processes of various departments, and establish relatively independent sub-business processes and auxiliary business processes serving them. "

—— Quoted from Baidu Encyclopedia business process entry

For many newcomers, the most difficult thing to do business is to divide the level of business flow chart.

First of all, make clear the scope of the business process you want to sort out-tell stories within the scope of this business process with big and thick key nodes, which is the top-level business flow chart. Your top-level business flow chart is a simple expression of the overall business story, but please note that the overall business here is not necessarily the overall business of the company, but the business scope you define. For example, the following picture shows the daily operation flow chart of the restaurant. If your business scope is customer-oriented ordering and checkout process, then this is the top-level business flow chart. However, if the business process of the whole restaurant is defined, it is obviously a subset-excluding restaurant procurement, supplier management, first-class inventory management and so on.

Secondly, from the top-level business process decomposition, from coarse to fine. Carding principles of top-level business flow chart:

1. defines the overall business story within the scope.

2. Include the key nodes within this range. Moreover, when questioned why a link does not exist, you should know that it should be included in that key node in the next decomposition. For example, giving away 10 anniversary coupons should appear in the settlement node decomposition. Print orders will be broken down in the ordering node. The preparation of children's seats should be reception and seating.

3. The key nodes decomposed from the top-level flowchart may not all be refined and decomposed to generate the second-level and third-level flowcharts. It depends on whether the "activities" and "roles" involved in the node are complex.

Look at another case to decompose the main business processes of traditional production enterprises. Orange represents the decomposition point, which can be decomposed into four layers. When we decompose into the fourth layer, we find that there are few activities and roles involved in the next step, so we don't need to decompose it any more. Instead, we can directly regard the key nodes of the fourth layer as the "activities" of the third layer business process, instead of the sub-flow chart.

Of course, it depends on your goal of combing business processes. If you just want to analyze and optimize the "proofing" link, you can continue to decompose it.

The work in this step will help you to establish a clear process directory structure, as shown in the figure below, which is the directory structure extracted from a newly completed process carding project. It can be seen that the whole map is the key node at the top level. As a boss, it may be enough to look at this floor. The top floor will be disassembled in more detail below.

“H3。 Sample authentication is only an activity in the top-level business flow chart, but in this level of refinement, it will include detailed sub-activities 1 level participants.

I usually use the first two lines of activities, judgments, logical relationship lines, start and end, and the second line of subprocesses and documents/tables. If you are not a symbol controller, I suggest that these are enough.

The "sub-process" icon can help you connect the sub-processes obtained by process decomposition. For example, when "Process A" involves the "A 1. 1" process that needs to be further decomposed, sub-process symbols can be used to represent "A 1. 1" in "Process A". Then your readers will understand that to further understand "A 1. 1", you should refer to another flowchart.

Common structure of flow chart:

Let me show you some cases:

Flowchart that basically contains most of the charts:

Only a few simple flow charts with illustrations are used (they are called program charts in the documents of Taiwan Province Province-but the program here is not a computer program, but a process, which only reflects the processing flow between tasks, so it is not surprising to use extremely simple symbols):

The above two flow chart cases, from the complexity of symbols, one is a complete flow chart and the other is a basic flow chart, but from the form of expression, they all belong to the "swimming lane". This is also our most commonly used expression. The swimlane diagram can well reflect the responsibilities of various departments or roles in the process and the cooperative relationship between upstream and downstream. Moreover, the standard of the flow chart itself is easy to master, and it is easier to understand.

What is the way to verify whether you have done the above and avoid Donnot?

Very easy to handle, review with you in time. Bring all stakeholders together and show them the results you have sorted out.

This will find some interesting things, besides judging whether your flow chart is in line with reality, it will also judge whether the current business process is in line with the ideal. Representatives from different departments and positions will confirm the status quo in this review, and they will also express their opinions and even quarrel with each other, which is a good opportunity for process optimization. Not for the time being.