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Process Documentation?
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Posted by Garland Coulson
Oct 12, 2017 at 08:33 PM
I am at the point where I am passing a lot of my routine work to virtual assistants.
So I need to document all my processes prior to handing them on.
I have been playing with Process St and REALLY like it’s ease of use and interface, but I am reluctant to add another monthly fee to all the current software subscriptions I have to pay.
I do have OneNote and it comes close but would be hard to organize with each process being a tab.
It seems to me perhaps there might be an open source or lower cost/one time fee alternative. Perhaps a wiki would work?
What are your thoughts?
Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 12, 2017 at 08:50 PM
Garland Coulson wrote:
I am at the point where I am passing a lot of my routine work to virtual
>assistants.
>
>So I need to document all my processes prior to handing them on.
>
>It seems to me perhaps there might be an open source or lower cost/one
>time fee alternative. Perhaps a wiki would work?
What is a virtual assistant?
For simple task delegation and tracking I just use WorkFlowy, enhanced with some Stylish CSS scripts that colour in date tags (starting with @, e.g. @12_Oct_2017) and hashtags, such as #WAITING, so I know I’m waiting for someone to complete that task.
If your needs are more complex, then ConnectedText can certainly help in slicing and dicing and recombining the data in weird and wonderful ways.
But it’s a lot more hassle than just banging stuff into WorkFlowy, especially with Chrome extensions such as “Clip to WorkFlowy.”
Posted by MadaboutDana
Oct 13, 2017 at 07:55 AM
Personally, I’d be strongly in favour of a wiki, but much depends on how you work.
I can recommend Dokuwiki, which is relatively easy to set up, has a powerful search engine, and if you don’t want to set it up on your own web server, is hosted by lots of service providers.
But Wordpress also offers a plethora of useful themes. One of them, which might meet your needs, is PrimusNote (http://www.primusnote.org for live demo). It’s free, and it’s got a lovely set of functions (they also offer hosted services, but those start at a relatively robust USD 29 per month, albeit for apparently unlimited users and 5GB of storage space).
A free option would be Samepage (http://www.samepage.io). Don’t be put off by the fact that the free option only includes 10 pages; you get 1GB of space (more than enough for most purposes), plus a plethora of team options. You can put any number of items on a page, because of the way Samepage is structured (by different kinds of elements, including text elements, task elements, file management elements, calendar elements etc. etc.). It’s best to go and try it out, because it will surprise you. It’s the successor to Kerio Workspace, which we still use internally because it’s so user-friendly and capacious. If you decide you like it, the pricing isn’t outrageous.
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by Paul Korm
Oct 13, 2017 at 02:36 PM
“Document all my processes” can have a lot of nuances—from “writing up some todo list templates” to “making formal BPMN process notation. If you are thinking more toward the right end of that spectrum—some degree of process formalization—I’d recommend Cacoo or Lucidchart. I prefer Lucidchart because it has integrations that I need, but Cacoo has some nice features too. Both have individual or team options.
Garland Coulson wrote:
I am at the point where I am passing a lot of my routine work to virtual
>assistants.
>
>So I need to document all my processes prior to handing them on.
>
>I have been playing with Process St and REALLY like it’s ease of use and
>interface, but I am reluctant to add another monthly fee to all the
>current software subscriptions I have to pay.
>
>I do have OneNote and it comes close but would be hard to organize with
>each process being a tab.
>
>It seems to me perhaps there might be an open source or lower cost/one
>time fee alternative. Perhaps a wiki would work?
>
>What are your thoughts?
Posted by MadaboutDana
Oct 13, 2017 at 03:10 PM
I like the look of Cacoo, I must say. From the original description of the need, I felt that text descriptions played a fairly important part in what Garland is trying to achieve, and Cacoo appears to be flexible enough to support text as well as diagrams. Lucidchart looks pretty cool, but very much charting only. But that’s from a very superficial glance!