Project Manager ain't happy, ain't nobody happy

March 18, 2008 10:42 AM

Good online resources for help with writing procedures and creating flowcharts?

One of my main roles in my current job is project manager for a growing team of software developers and testers. The larger my team grows, and the more complex the project grows, the more I feel the need to have some procedures in place.

Right now I need to define a procedure (or set of procedures) that covers issue life cycle for new development and bugs and making daily internal test builds.

I'm having a hard time striking a balance between depth and breadth, on the one side, and readability on the other. I'd like to make sure the guys don't have to read too many different documents, but I also don't want to produce a 100 page document.

I'd also like for the docs that I do make to be well indexed, so everyone knows where to look in order to find out what needs to be done next, and how to do it.

Are there any good online resources that can help me out with this task? Are there any good boilerplate procedures online that I can use as guidelines?

posted by syzygy to work & money (2 comments total)

I can't point you to any procedure creation guidelines, but I've seen a few online diagramming tools in the past. I googled a little and came up with AutoDesk DRAW which looks like it would work for drawing up some flow charts.

There have been a bunch of other tool out there, I'll keep hunting and maybe I'll remember some of them.
posted by jjb at 11:28 AM on March 18

Hi jjb: thanks for the tools recommendation. I'm using Visio to handle drawing the flowcharts.

My problems are more in the realm of figuring out how to break the processes down, how many steps need to go on one page, how much detail to include.

It seems as I work on a procedure flowchart, I keep realizing new variables, and what I hoped to fit on one page, now seems like it could easily take up 20, and nobody's going to follow a 20 page flowchart.
posted by syzygy at 11:20 AM on March 19