today was like old times. i spent the day building a click-through process map for the company’s sales process. stars above, i am a geek. truly.
as you may know if you know me, for years i was the ‘visio’ queen. i’ve been one of their foremost advocates, since they were 1.0 made by shapeware, through the acquisition by microsoft.
in truth, i lost a lot of faith in the product upon its acquisition. things changed. it wasn’t elegant like it used to be. the process of moving it into the ms gui standard turned out some oddities i didn’t like.
then, of course, there was the pricing.
since then, i’ve been looking for something as simple, sweet, and elegant and i have finally found it in a product called ‘Concept Draw‘.
i kid you not, it’s like finding visio for the first time all over again, though admittedly, i’m a late adopter to it. i guess i hung on for visio longer than i should.
but. i did find it. and today, i spent the day thoroughly enjoying diagramming. hah. yes, i am a geek and no, i don’t mind at all that i am.
there is something really rewarding about taking a snarled set of information and turning it into a very simple to navigate, easy to understand map that anyone can pick up and move through and come away from with a feeling that they actually understand what is happening.
and i am thoroughly delighted with the product Concept Draw itself. my goodness, but it does a lot. not only will it output to graphic, HTML, or even XML format, it will actually output to Flash and PowerPoint if you’re so inclined.
my personal favorite is to output to HTML and have a convenient, click-through diagram system where people can move through the process with a click and follow branches and exceptions to their end point.
i’ve got a bit more of these to do to get the entire company documented, but this is a darn good start. once that diagram is approved, i can go back and write up the storyboards to accompany it and lay in the related documents or templates in use and voila! a very thorough and complete set of documentation.
did i mention that i miss this kind of work?