Jim Phelps now wants to bring his Core Team together to discuss the charge from The Secretary. This should be represented on the model as a meeting.
Add the meeting to the worksheet as you did before:
Your process model now shows Jim Phelps is having a meeting with himself. This only makes sense if he were a Zen master. It is time to add the other members of the Impossible Missions Force to the meeting. Before you can do this, you must add them to the team field, and before you can do that, you must add them to the team database.
Normally, Jim would already have his entire IMF team added to his team database, and would only have to drag the members he wants on his mission team into the team field. In this case, we will enter them as we proceed.
As you did earlier, click in the Org Chart (the left-hand pane of the window) below Jim Phelps' entry. A new entry is added to the org chart and the Team Member Information window opens. Just like the Process Element Information window, there is a Brief version of this window that only shows the Name field. Since that is all the information we are entering, it makes sense not to clutter up the screen with the full window. Click the Brief button and drag the window to a convenient place on your screen.
Now type in the name of the first member of Jim's Team - "Cinnamon Carter" and click the Apply button. If you need to review how to add a member to the Org Chart, please return to the Building the Team section of the tutorial.
Drag Cinnamon onto the Team Field to the right of Jim Phelps.
Similarly, add "Rollin Hand" to the Org Chart and drag him to the team field to the right of Cinnamon.
The figure above shows all four members of the Team Field as separate and distinct. Jim would like the individual IMF members to be recognized as members of the IMF, not just as individuals. TeamFlow allows you to construct a hierarchical team database that has precisely that effect.
To construct a hierarchy, we first need an entry in the Org Chart to which we can assign Cinnamon and Rollin. Add an entry named "Impossible Missions Force" to the Org Chart.
Make Cinnamon a member of the IMF by dragging her entry onto the new IMF entry:
Cinnamon's entry in both the org chart and the team field now clearly show her to be a member of the IMF.
Compare the way the Cinnamon Carter entry is displayed with the way the Jim Phelps entry is displayed. Jim Phelps' parent organization is the single root member of the team database. Such team members are displayed in the team field without their parent organization. Cinnamon Carter's parent organization is not the root member - it is the Impossible Missions Force entry. Team members whose parent organization is not the root member are displayed in the team field beneath the name of their parent organization.
Now drag the Rollin Hand org chart entry onto the Impossible Missions Force entry in the org chart just as you did Cinnamon's.
Notice how the Impossible Missions Force banner has extended itself to cover both the Cinnamon Carter entry and the Rollin Hand entry in the team field. Whenever adjacent team field entries have the same parent organization, the parent's entry is drawn so as to span its subordinate entries as shown. This provides visual reinforcement of the fact that Cinnamon and Rollin are on the team as members of the Impossible Missions Force.
There are two other members of the IMF who need to be added - Barney Collier and Willie Armitage. To add them directly to the IMF, you must click either between the IMF entry and Cinnamon's entry, or between Cinnamon and Rollin.
The rule is that new entries to the org chart are added to the right-most vertical line that intersects the entry's row.
If you click between Cinnamon and Rollin, the right-most vertical line drops down out of the IMF entry, so the new entry is added there. If you click the mouse below Rollin's entry, there is no vertical line to intersect, so the new entry is added to the top-level "The Team" entry by default.
Click in the Org chart between Cinnamon and Rollin and add "Barney Collier" and "Willie Armitage" as shown in the figure below. Now drag them onto the team field to the right of the current entries.
As you might have expected, the Impossible Missions Force banner above Cinnamon and Rollin in the Team Field has been extended to include Barney and Willie.
Notice also that the order of the team field members is not related to the order the same members appear in the Org chart. We could have placed Cinnamon to the right of Willie or in between Barney and Willie had we chose. Indeed, you can rearrange the team field entries simply by dragging them from their current positions to their new positions at any time. Sometimes a little rearranging can greatly simplify the clutter of a complex model.
Now we are ready to add the IMF members to the meeting with Jim.
In TeamFlow, participation in a process element is indicated by the presence
of a segment of that process element in the column beneath a team field entry.
Up to now, we have only entered single-segment process elements.
Now we need to show a process element - this meeting - that is to be performed
by several team members.
TeamFlow provides two ways to add additional team members to a process element.
We will use the simpler method:
The worksheet now shows both Jim and Barney in the meeting.
Notice the dashed lines that connect the two segments. These lines indicate
that the segments belong to the same process element. They also serve to
graphically indicate that the intervening team members - Cinnamon and Rollin -
are not involved in the meeting.
Now add Cinnamon, Rollin, and Willie to the meeting by shift-draging
any existing segment of the meeting to each of their columns.
Finally, connect the meeting to the rest of the process by drawing an arrow
from the preceeding process element (the Task) to the meeting.
Since this is Jim Phelps' meeting, and since he is responsible for bringing
The Secretary's charge to the meeting, the process flow arrow coming in to
the meeting should come into Jim's segment. Drag a new arrow from the task
to Jim's segment of the meeting.
The meaning would be quite different if the arrow entered the meeting in,
say, Rollin Hand's column. The implication would be that Jim Phelps handed
the information coming out of the task to Rollin. This method of showing
the flow of information between team members is one of the most important
(and most often overlooked) benefits of TeamFlow's deployment flowcharting
methodology. It shows quite clearly how information flows between the steps
of the process (the vertical component of the arrows) and how information
flows between team members (the horizontal component of the arrows).
Out of these IMF meetings always come two things. Jim would develop the
operations plan and Barney Collier would develop the technical wizardry
to make it happen. You can represent those two plans as reports belonging
to Jim and Barney, respectively.
Add a report titled "Ops Plan" to Jim's column and draw an arrow from Jim's
segment of the meeting down to the report.
Now add another report titled "Tech Plan" below the meeting in Barney Collier's
column and draw an arrow to it from Barney's segment of the meeting.
Did you add the two reports in the same row as shown above or in different rows?
If you want, you can relocate a process element by grabbing it with the mouse
and dragging it vertically. TeamFlow correctly redraws any arrows connected to
the relocated process element.
Return to the beginning of this section.
Return to the beginning of Lesson 1.
Return to the Tutorial Table of Contents.
Return to the TeamFlow Home Page
Last Update: October 24, 2005