When you think of flowcharting do you imagine a computer programmer drawing a flowchart of the logic path through an algorithm? That is, after all, where the concept of flowcharting originated. But the flowchart is a clear graphic representation of a process from beginning to end, regardless of whether that process is an algorithm or a manufacturing process. The tool once used by computer programmers exclusively has now become one of the fundamental tools of Quality. If you are only using one Quality software tool, it should be a Flowcharter of some kind.

The most important lessons today's Quality practitioners can take from Dr. Deming and the Total Quality Management movement of the 1980s are that Quality = Process, and that everything is a process. Managing the processes in your operation is crucial to assuring quality systems.

Many Quality consultants who have measured the effect on companies of actively managing their core processes have come to the same conclusion: 30% of any process that is not rigorously managed adds no value to the finished product. Eliminating this 30% non-value-added work can result in dramatic savings in the time it takes to perform the process, the cost of the work, and the quality of the finished product.

Drawing a flowchart is the first step toward managing a process. Since humans are primarily a visual species, drawing a picture of a process conveys more information in a smaller space than any other way of communicating. Someone reading the text-only description of the same process might not understand subtle interactions between various components. Making the process visible makes it easier to manage and improve.

 
History of Flowcharting

Flowcharting was originally developed by and for computer programmers. The first ones were hand drawn, making changes difficult and messy. As computer became capable of graphic representation the first flowcharting software was developed, still just for programmers.

Two changes occurred that move the flowchart into the business world. First, programmers migrated into management positions bringing their tools with them. Second, the computer industry moved to a mouse-and-menu driven environment, making graphic programs easier to manipulate. As the business community began to realize the potential of flowcharting software, enterprising software developers responded with a variety of packages for the desktop computer.

 
Second Generation Flowcharting Tools

The second generation of desktop flowcharting tools made great strides toward making these old, clunky programming tools usable by real people. Products such as ABC Flowcharter (www.micrografx.com), CorelFlow (www.corel.com) and Visio (www.visio.com), among many other good programs, let you quickly and easily draw basic flowcharts. They are moderately priced in the $150 - $300 range and provide all the basic flowcharting functionality you would need to draw common business flowcharts such as the one in Figure 1.

Figure 1 shows a typical business flowchart representing the first phase of a product development process. A Charge is given to a core team. They respond with a Mission Statement that is approved. Someone does the initial work of surveying both the market and the current state of the appropriate technology. A product specification is developed and approved. At this point, the company has enough information to decide whether or not to proceed with the new product development program.

A flowchart, even this simple one, draws a picture of a process that can be readily understood in seconds. The logic flow takes you from the beginning of the process through all the branching and recombining decision paths to its several possible end points. Not only does it show the process, it provides a tool for communicating that process in a clear and concise way.

 
Specialized Flowcharting Tools

As business requirements have grown more sophisticated, the need has emerged for more specialized flowcharting tools. In response to these needs, several new classes of software tools have emerged. Project Management, Workflow and Dataflow Diagraming, Dynamic Process Modeling and Deployment Flowcharting are all offshoots of basic flowcharting, each designed to solve a different business problem. Which class of tool is right for you depends on what you are managing or which aspect of your project is most important to you.

 
Project Managers

The need to attach start and finish dates to the individual steps of a process and thereby create a project schedule has lead to the class of Project Management software that included Microsoft Project (www.microsoft.com) and Primavera Project Planner (www.primavera.com). Strictly speaking, project managers are not an outgrowth of flowcharting programs. The roots of today's project managers, the PERT (Project Evaluation and Review Technique) and CPM (Critical Path Method) methodologies, began in the 1950s in the Polaris nuclear submarine program. The first commercial project management software, PROJECT/2, appeared in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, CPM and PERT diagrams are essentially flowcharts with dates attached. If you are managing a large construction project, if you need features like resource-constrained scheduling and Monte Carlo risk analysis, project management systems can be an indispensable part of your job. But they are not simple tools and can require a clerk whose entire job is feeding data into the project management program.

 
Workflow and Dataflow Diagraming

"Workflow" refers to the automation of tasks, not process. Dataflow diagraming techniques such as the Air Force-developed IDEF0 methodology focuses on the flow of data, or information, through a system. The workflow version of the process shown in Figure 1 would present the team members with the actual forms to be filled out, and would move the completed forms from there to the person who must read and process them. Lotus Notes (www.lotus.com) and BPwin (www.logicworks.com) are good representatives of Workflow and IDEF0 products, respectively.

 
Dynamic Process Modeling

Some applications that include real-time or time-critical processes require the ability to do dynamic process modeling. Programs such as Process Charter (www.scitor.com) and Optima! (www.micrografx.com) allow the user to create complex interactive models, and then watch how their models perform as time passes. This tends to be a multi-step process. First, you create a process flowchart just as you would with a simple flowchart program. Then you add resources and calendars to the project similar to setting up a project management system to do resource-constrained scheduling. The simulator will then "run" your process, showing you how information moves through the process. In modeling an order-entry system, you could set up a case where many orders were received in a short time to see where bottlenecks occurred and where more resources might be profitably used.

 
Deployment Flowcharting

The emerging Quality movement in the 1980s brought its own special requirements to flowcharting. Quality's focus on the Team made it imperative that any flowcharting program that was to find a use in a Quality-driven organization be able to model how the Team fits into the Process. Several unsuccessful attempts were made to do this before someone finally turned to the father of the Quality movement himself, Dr. Deming.

Deming's work at Komatsu Tractor Company had resulted in a new type of flowchart which showed the team members across the top of the flowchart. Each process step was aligned vertically under the team member or members who were working it. Process steps were connected by arrows as in ordinary flowcharts to indicate the flow through the process. The Japanese term for this new type of flowchart, which roughly translates into "management across the functions" was Anglicized into "Cross-Functional Management." Dr. Myron Tribus, former Dean of the Dartmouth College Thayer School of Engineering and a disciple of Dr. Deming, popularized the new methodology in America and named it Deployment Flowcharting for the way it illustrates how the team is deployed throughout the process.

The "simple" innovation of adding the team to the process flowchart has dramatically changed the amount of information conveyed by the picture. Figure 2 shows our product development process as depicted by TeamFlow (www.teamflow.com), a Deployment Flowcharting program.

Compare this with the flowchart of the same process shown in Figure 1. The Deployment Flowchart shows who on the team is involved in each step. You can plainly see the decision to "Accept Mission Statement" is being made by the Executive Committee. It shows where team members have to work together to accomplish a step: the task to "Develop Process Template..." is being done by the V.P. of Marketing and the Sales group.

The Deployment Flowchart also shows how information flows between team members. The horizontal component of each arrow indicates a hand-off of information from one team member to another. If the Executive Committee approves the team's Mission Statement, this information is conveyed to the V.P. of Marketing, not to another team member. These micro customer/supplier relationships are at the very heart of team-based Quality. They answer the question "Who is my Customer? Who will use the work I am doing?" for each team member at every step of the process.

 
The Future of Flowcharting for the Quality Market

Flowchart software, like much of the rest of the software industry, is moving in two general directions - Integrated and Internet. Integrated means combining all related information into the same document. Internet means distributed. What once could be kept on your desktop now must be distributed, in some cases world-wide, as teams disperse and become virtual.

Because process is the core of any Quality-driven system, it is only natural to think of the process flowchart as being the core of the data associated with that system. As products move toward integration and the Internet, they need to encompass features that support these ideas. Such features include the ability to integrate the flowchart with other applications and stored data such as schedules, costs and personnel information through direct links. Your flowchart program should allow you to attach an on-line document, created by any application on your system, to any process step, and then open and view that document directly from the process flowchart.

Think of this in the context of an ISO-9000 process. One of the ISO requirements is that the team members have access to the appropriate standards and support documentation and that they can trust the document to be the latest revision. If the process of updating a document defines publication of a new revision as updating the link from the process flowchart to the new revision, then that trust is assured. Any document I open from the process flowchart is, by definition, the latest revision. What was once one of the most cumbersome on-going requirements of ISO-9000 to meet has become almost trivial! Used in this way, the process flowchart becomes the "road map" to all the documentation associated with the Quality system being modeled, wherever that documentation may reside.

The other significant trend is towards distribution of both people and information. It is rare these days to find a project team which is entirely co-located. Even the definition of "co-located" is changing. In their excellent (and highly recommended) book Virtual Teams (John Wiley & Sons), Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps define co-located as a radius of only fifty feet! Teams that are not co-located - virtual teams - require some constant, reliable form of electronic communication to support their teamwork. The Internet has become the communications medium of choice for virtual teams because of its widespread availability and relatively insignificant cost. In order to support this emerging way of working, flowchart programs must support the Internet.

Internet features allow your process flowchart to be accessible by all the members of the team, including your customers and your external suppliers. Publishing your flowchart to an intranet or internet is a good first start. More full featured programs will have a flowchart that allows full interaction via the internet to give the greatest access and greatest flexibility to virtual teams and external customers. Teams that read and write process models across the Internet can be more productive regardless of location or time issues. Flowcharters that allow you to attach Internet-resident HTML documents to process steps and view them from within the model provide the solution to the need for shared documents. Used in this way, your process flowchart and all the documents attached to it becomes the planning tool, the communications tool and the foundation of the knowledge base for any project.

About the Author

Ronald M. Cordes has spent most his career developing software to help people manage their work. He was a key developer of PROJECT/2 in the 1970s and the MAXIMO Maintenance Management system in the 1980s. He founded CFM Inc. in 1989 to develop and market TeamFlow, the first Deployment Flowcharting system. He may be reached at (781)275-5258, FAX (781)275-7008, or .

Article Copyright 1998-2003 CFM Inc. Bedford, MA. All Rights Reserved.

Last Update: March 14, 2003