Creating flowcharts is one of the best ways to ensure that your ideas and facts get well presented in a visually appealing way and easy-to-understand way. Most flowcharts are easy to make; however, making effective flowcharts may become complex in some complex processes. There are various diagramming tools available that can help you make flow charts and other diagrams easily.
There are a few best practices that one would follow and ensure that they have the best flowcharts that are easy to understand and for any complex tasks, made easy by using diagramming tools.
Listed below are some of the tips to help you create the best flowcharts
- Have a reason/ purpose for drawing the flowchart
This is something that should get done with any diagram, let alone a flowchart. The latter stages get a little easier after you’ve determined why you’re developing flowcharts.
You may use this to describe a process to someone, gain a better understanding of a process. And identify bottlenecks in a process. You may change your flowchart depending on the scenario and the audience.
- Color coding
In your flowchart, you may utilize a color scheme to distinguish different items. It may get used in highlighting processes that belong to varying parties, complex processes/decisions, a specific path in a process, etc. If color-coding isn’t your style, you can use it to distinguish between procedures and choices. However, always add a legend in the corner to understand reading the chart and what the flowchart colors mean.
- Ensure you include swimlanes
The most effortless approach to describe a process flow that involves several responsible parties is to use a swimlane chart or things. And they make it simple to determine who or what is accountable for each phase. If you have many actors, you should try to generalize them as much as feasible. For example, instead of having three columns for John, Paul, and Peter in the Sales department, put them all together in the Sales department. It all depends on who the target audience is.
- Decide on the start and endpoints of the chart.
That may seem to be insignificant. However, when creating a flowchart, ensure you have decided on a start and an end.
It is necessary to ensure that your chart comes to a planned end. A flow with unpredictable endpoints causes more confusion than it solves. Therefore pick your goals and make them simple.
- Break it down into multiple flows
Long flowcharts may be complicated, and they might cause the reader to miss important facts that you’re attempting to express. A flowchart should get broken down into sub-flows. Most diagramming programs use the connector and inbuilt link capability to build automatically connected pages with sub-flows.
- Include your team
Documenting procedures or planning phases necessitates careful consideration. To make this process go more smoothly, you may utilize diagramming tools with built-in collaborative features.
In conclusion, creating flowcharts may seem like an easy process. However, for the most complex ones, the tips mentioned above will be helpful to ensure that you make better, easy-to-understand flowcharts.
