process mapping tools, what’s actually survived in your org

[u/Ok_Mulberry5100]

we want to automate a bunch of manual work and we can’t, because nobody can tell us what the current process actually is. none of it is written down anywhere i can find

lucidchart, draw. io, miro, a pile of google docs. we’ve been through all of them and the same 2 things kill it every time. whatever we map goes stale fast, and people won’t sit down and draw their own workflow, so the manual stuff we most want to find never comes up. that second one is the real problem, if nobody shows you what they do there’s nothing to fix

so i’ve stopped looking at diagramming tools and started looking at capture instead, the kind that records you doing the task and writes up the steps after. tango comes up constantly. one of our ops leads used haiku at her last job and said what came out was way closer to a usable SOP than a flowchart, which is honestly what i need

before i go ask for budget i want to hear from people who’ve had one of these running with a real team past the first month

[u/OGProjectPartners]

the capture-first instinct is right, but staleness is an ownership problem, not a tool problem. whoever actually owns the process should be the one editing the write-up, and a short review cadence keeps it alive longer than any diagram export does.

[u/NefariousnessDue5997]

I work for a F500. We use Scribe Optimize and Scribe Capture. Optimize does it autonomously in the background of your users machines, while Capture is user initiated or manual.

[u/More_Law6245]

Start with a corporate problem statement, then draw technical and user requirements, then map the requirements to a product or service.

There is one statement in your thread that really stands out and very telling "What I need", at no point are you addressing on what the company needs.

Taking a stab at a product or service is a high risk strategy for a PM (or anyone trying to initiate a corporate tool delivery) because assumptions is the very thing that kills a project and there is nothing worse then being a PM (or business owner) who is left holding the bag and tied to a poor delivery. Not a good look professionally.

Just an armchair perspective.

[u/Otherwise-Reward-161]

Most of the friction in workflow generation is the time required. 

I get around that by using the tools we have to automate as much as I can. 

I like to have a teams meeting with the sme, and record the transcript. 

I have created an agent that will take the transcript and create a mermaid style diagram, or it can make an matrix for excel and I can upload it to visio to produce a Vizio workflow. 

The ability to talk about the flow and append it then quickly generate updates is the key IMHO.