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)

Validating the structure and syntax of BPMN diagrams

As shown in Chapter 3, Visio has a built-in engine to validate that a diagram adheres to certain standards. This validation will check for errors in the graphical syntax, such as the following:

  • Are all shapes connected?
  • Does a gateway shape have one or at least one incoming connection only (so does one arrowhead end at the gateway shape)?
  • Does a gateway shape have at least two outgoing connections (so it is indeed a branch we documented)?

These and many more rules are already stored in the diagram template. So, all we need to do is to invoke the Check Diagram feature.rules checking.

Since Visio has a built-in rule-checking engine, we can use this and tell it to check this diagram according to the rules and standards of the BPMN notation rules. This will ensure that we will have a diagram that correctly follows the BPMN visual syntax:

Figure 4.15 – Access to the diagram validation feature

Figure 4.15 – Access to the diagram validation...