Mapping Workflows and Managing Knowledge

Introduction

7:00 AM is a miserable time of the morning to have to start work; it is an even more miserable time to begin a presentation on a difficult job to an even more difficult audience, only to have it end by nearly being booed off the platform about 15 minutes later. I know this because it happened to me a long time ago, when I first tried to present a complex diagram of a flow of work to a meeting of the Common Automatic Test Equipment Integrated Logistics Support Management Team (CATE/ILSMT, to insiders) in San Diego one beautiful summer morning in 1980. Out of this experience, in some ways, grew the procedure I am going to share in this small volume. This technique, called workflow mapping and analysis (WFMA), is a way of visually capturing ...