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)

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to create a BPMN-type diagram in Visio Plan 2 or Visio Professional. We also learned how to configure the shapes to represent the various options the BPMN standard allows and defines. In the end, we also saw that rule checking in Visio can help us to validate and visually spell-check the diagram. So, with this chapter, we learned how to find the BPMN template, invoke it correctly, and also use the built-in mechanisms to create diagrams that are correct according to the BPMN visual standard. This approach ensures that we can quickly create diagrams with very few elements. Beyond that, Visio can check for us whether we have made some minor visual mistakes, ensuring we get a full BPMN-compliant diagram.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to use data sources in business process diagrams in Visio.