Book Image

Visualize Complex Processes with Microsoft Visio

By : David J Parker, Šenaj Lelić
Book Image

Visualize Complex Processes with Microsoft Visio

By: David J Parker, Šenaj Lelić

Overview of this book

Every business has process flows, but not all of them are fully described to or verified for accuracy with each stakeholder. This not only presents a risk for business continuity but also removes the ability to make insightful improvements. To make these complex interactions easy to grasp, it’s important to describe these processes visually using symbology that everybody understands. Different parts of these flows should be collaboratively developed and stored securely as commercial collateral. Visualize Complex Processes with Microsoft Visio helps you understand why it is crucial to use a common, systematic approach to document the steps needed to meet each business requirement. This book explores the various process flow templates available in each edition of Microsoft Visio, including BPMN. It also shows you how to use them effectively with the help of tips and techniques and examples to reduce the time required for creating them, as well as how you can improve their integration and presentation. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the skills needed to create data-integrated business flowcharts with Microsoft Visio, learned how to effectively use these diagrams collaboratively, but securely, and understood how to integrate them with other M365 apps, including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Power Automate.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Changes and formatting of all BPMN shapes

The BPMN standard defines every object not only by its initial configuration but also by several variations. For example, following the BPMN standards, Start Event can have several visual variations, and the container object can be either a pool or a lane. With normal diagramming tools, they would have to be different objects, but here, we use the Visio technology of smart shapes, which allows us to have one object with variations instead of various different objects. This section will show you how to manipulate the shapes and where to get the variation of the shape you need for your documentation.

Accessing the variations through metadata

All variations of a specific object can be set by setting the corresponding metadata. Metadata in Visio is called shape data. So, we start by opening Shape Data Window in Visio. Access to this window is placed on the Data ribbon tab:

Figure 4.5 – Access to Shape Data Window

Figure 4.5 – Access to Shape Data...