OmniGraffle for iPad - describe business processes
By the nature of my business, I have to lead projects for implementing solutions based on erp-, crm- and eam-concepts. Any enterprise automation project starts with a survey. And if the automation object is outside your city, then, as a rule, it is a long trip (from two weeks) in order to understand the business processes of the enterprise, in order to later write a technical task for the information system. On such business trips, you usually take a laptop with you, but in an extreme business trip, I decided to take with me only an iPad, and of course a flash drive for documents.
In general, the question whether it is possible to work on an iPad or not, everyone decides for himself. Personally, I answered this question for a long time to myself - yes, you can. On the iPad, in the context of small tables in Moscow cafes, I have often held presentations that have made a very good impression on customers. But in “combat” conditions, when the iPad should be a replacement for a laptop in a number of specific tasks, I hadn’t experienced this until that time.
So, the task. Large Holding, eight subsidiaries, four of which are necessary to visit and conduct a survey (on other similar processes). Location - Kazakhstan, cities - Astana, Almaty and Atyrau. The task of the project is the development and implementation of an automated corporate holding management system. I don’t want to carry a laptop with you all over Kazakhstan, therefore technical tools: iPad, stylus and flash drive. Software - OmniGraffle for iPad from the Omni Group.
OmniGraffle as a whole is a tool for prototyping interfaces and describing various interactions. The cost in the AppStore is about $ 50, which by the standards of the store is not so modest, but if we are talking about a professional tool, then why not. Moreover, the purchase of the program later fully justified itself.
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The first two days of the survey, our team conducted interviews with participants of various business processes, at the end of the working day a small working group for 15 minutes summarizing the results for the day and making new additions (corrections) to the process description. After the working group, someone went further to collect documents and interview the holding's employees, and I drew diagrams of individual processes and regulations. In the process of drawing schemes, I realized that using OmniGraffle, drawing business process diagrams can be pretty fast. For example, on the flowchart below, if you have a sketch in pencil on paper, you will spend no more than 5 minutes.
But, if we are talking about the integrated automation of the enterprise, then there will be a lot of processes that need to be examined, and accordingly there will also be schemes. In order to save time, I began to draw diagrams and make additions to existing conversations with participants of business processes as they went along. There were no interruptions in the process of talking with apologies: “Wait, I’m drawing”. Flowchart diagrams with OmniGraffle were really fast, with:
1. You receive a scheme that can be sent directly from OmniGraffle via e-mail to all interested participants in the process, for example, in the * .png format. Thus, it will be possible to discuss not your “sketches in pencil” on the working group, but the working version of the scheme.
2. You get a business process diagram ready for use in the draft technical specifications.
To help the user, OmniGraffle contains a large collection of stencils:
• Colors
• Connections
• Fills
• Fonts
• Konigi Wireframes Stencils of this group are related to prototyping, which will be discussed in more detail in the following reviews.
• Shapes
• Software
• Three-Dimensional
• variables
If the existing stencils do not suit you, the application provides drawing tools — a contour (rectangle, circle, triangle, rounded rectangle, rhombus), an arbitrary curve (if you close the curve, a contour will be formed), a link and text.
The developers of the Omni Group tried to simplify the process of working with the application as much as possible. OmniGraffle supports working with layers. Layers can be hidden, blocked and interchanged. So during the survey, if the understanding of a certain part of the process is currently not straightforward and requires additional discussion, then you can draw this part of the scheme in several variants, on separate layers of the diagram. This will save you from having to duplicate a document and redraw a separate section in a new document. All schema options will be in one project schema file, and you can, by hiding a particular layer, create different schema options. Another option would be to use separate layers for comments and notes.
To address issues related to the alignment and positioning of objects, Omnigraffle proposes to use a grid (Grid). Positioning is performed as follows, if the user has placed the focus in the upper left corner, then when moving the program will tie to the grid exactly the upper left corner of the object, in which direction it would not move. If the alignment in the grid mode does not suit you, you can use the Smart guides mode, the program will display various prompts when moving an object, such as guides (thanks to which you can align objects along the top edge, center or bottom edge), the distance between the objects and other .
In most cases, the application allows you to trust him to work with connections. Having determined the connections from several different objects to one, the connecting lines will be aligned and collapsed automatically.
The chart alignment feature provides tools that allow you to change the location of objects on the diagram. Suppose we initially plotted a vertical diagram.
But, for example, at a certain point, we realized that if we continue, we will not fit horizontally, since there will be many more processes at the second level. By applying horizontal alignment to the diagram, the application itself changes the location of the objects and brings them to the horizontal diagram.
The size of the diagram can be configured by the user himself or by using the automatic chart size determination function.
Each object has its own properties that allow you to customize the fill, the appearance of the border, the shadow, font, size, position, etc. In addition, you can change and display the object. So, for example, working with a rectangular object, you can change its display and make it a circle or a star.
Needless to say, by the end of the survey, I had already agreed with the customer the diagrams of all business processes, and it was only upon returning from a trip to perform the descriptive part of the terms of reference.
Summing up, I want to note once again that OmniGraffle allows you to quickly and conveniently create business process diagrams, the developers have implemented many useful functions to help the user when working with the application. Maybe I forgot to mention some opportunities, but then you get used to good things quickly. I deliberately did not talk about synchronization with a PC, because I wanted to show the self-sufficiency of the version of OmniGraffle for iPad for solving problems related to the graphical representation of business processes.
In the following review, we will look at prototyping using OmniGraffle and I will also try to provide real examples of my work.
In general, the question whether it is possible to work on an iPad or not, everyone decides for himself. Personally, I answered this question for a long time to myself - yes, you can. On the iPad, in the context of small tables in Moscow cafes, I have often held presentations that have made a very good impression on customers. But in “combat” conditions, when the iPad should be a replacement for a laptop in a number of specific tasks, I hadn’t experienced this until that time.
So, the task. Large Holding, eight subsidiaries, four of which are necessary to visit and conduct a survey (on other similar processes). Location - Kazakhstan, cities - Astana, Almaty and Atyrau. The task of the project is the development and implementation of an automated corporate holding management system. I don’t want to carry a laptop with you all over Kazakhstan, therefore technical tools: iPad, stylus and flash drive. Software - OmniGraffle for iPad from the Omni Group.
OmniGraffle as a whole is a tool for prototyping interfaces and describing various interactions. The cost in the AppStore is about $ 50, which by the standards of the store is not so modest, but if we are talking about a professional tool, then why not. Moreover, the purchase of the program later fully justified itself.
')
The first two days of the survey, our team conducted interviews with participants of various business processes, at the end of the working day a small working group for 15 minutes summarizing the results for the day and making new additions (corrections) to the process description. After the working group, someone went further to collect documents and interview the holding's employees, and I drew diagrams of individual processes and regulations. In the process of drawing schemes, I realized that using OmniGraffle, drawing business process diagrams can be pretty fast. For example, on the flowchart below, if you have a sketch in pencil on paper, you will spend no more than 5 minutes.
But, if we are talking about the integrated automation of the enterprise, then there will be a lot of processes that need to be examined, and accordingly there will also be schemes. In order to save time, I began to draw diagrams and make additions to existing conversations with participants of business processes as they went along. There were no interruptions in the process of talking with apologies: “Wait, I’m drawing”. Flowchart diagrams with OmniGraffle were really fast, with:
1. You receive a scheme that can be sent directly from OmniGraffle via e-mail to all interested participants in the process, for example, in the * .png format. Thus, it will be possible to discuss not your “sketches in pencil” on the working group, but the working version of the scheme.
2. You get a business process diagram ready for use in the draft technical specifications.
To help the user, OmniGraffle contains a large collection of stencils:
• Colors
• Connections
• Fills
• Fonts
• Konigi Wireframes Stencils of this group are related to prototyping, which will be discussed in more detail in the following reviews.
• Shapes
• Software
• Three-Dimensional
• variables
If the existing stencils do not suit you, the application provides drawing tools — a contour (rectangle, circle, triangle, rounded rectangle, rhombus), an arbitrary curve (if you close the curve, a contour will be formed), a link and text.
The developers of the Omni Group tried to simplify the process of working with the application as much as possible. OmniGraffle supports working with layers. Layers can be hidden, blocked and interchanged. So during the survey, if the understanding of a certain part of the process is currently not straightforward and requires additional discussion, then you can draw this part of the scheme in several variants, on separate layers of the diagram. This will save you from having to duplicate a document and redraw a separate section in a new document. All schema options will be in one project schema file, and you can, by hiding a particular layer, create different schema options. Another option would be to use separate layers for comments and notes.
To address issues related to the alignment and positioning of objects, Omnigraffle proposes to use a grid (Grid). Positioning is performed as follows, if the user has placed the focus in the upper left corner, then when moving the program will tie to the grid exactly the upper left corner of the object, in which direction it would not move. If the alignment in the grid mode does not suit you, you can use the Smart guides mode, the program will display various prompts when moving an object, such as guides (thanks to which you can align objects along the top edge, center or bottom edge), the distance between the objects and other .
In most cases, the application allows you to trust him to work with connections. Having determined the connections from several different objects to one, the connecting lines will be aligned and collapsed automatically.
The chart alignment feature provides tools that allow you to change the location of objects on the diagram. Suppose we initially plotted a vertical diagram.
But, for example, at a certain point, we realized that if we continue, we will not fit horizontally, since there will be many more processes at the second level. By applying horizontal alignment to the diagram, the application itself changes the location of the objects and brings them to the horizontal diagram.
The size of the diagram can be configured by the user himself or by using the automatic chart size determination function.
Each object has its own properties that allow you to customize the fill, the appearance of the border, the shadow, font, size, position, etc. In addition, you can change and display the object. So, for example, working with a rectangular object, you can change its display and make it a circle or a star.
Needless to say, by the end of the survey, I had already agreed with the customer the diagrams of all business processes, and it was only upon returning from a trip to perform the descriptive part of the terms of reference.
Summing up, I want to note once again that OmniGraffle allows you to quickly and conveniently create business process diagrams, the developers have implemented many useful functions to help the user when working with the application. Maybe I forgot to mention some opportunities, but then you get used to good things quickly. I deliberately did not talk about synchronization with a PC, because I wanted to show the self-sufficiency of the version of OmniGraffle for iPad for solving problems related to the graphical representation of business processes.
In the following review, we will look at prototyping using OmniGraffle and I will also try to provide real examples of my work.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/126831/
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