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Are Flowcharts Too Complex?

August 25, 2008
In an earlier blog we talked about a training program that included both basic and advanced ideas to help people understand the value of workflow.  One of the concepts I consider very basic to the analysis of a workflow is flowchart or process map.

I find myself doodling flowcharts on napkins and newspapers in restaurants and airports while I talk to people on my cell phone. I am referring to the simplest of all flowcharts with start/stop points, arrows and decision boxes which typically point to bottlenecks in the process. Understand that what  I am describing is not complicated a flowchart overlaid over different departments, the plant layout and it was not very granular (in-depth).

What surprised me was that some people said it was a bit too in-depth a tool, did not have much practical application and did not offer much value. This is not the first time I have heard questions about the value of flowcharts, so I had a prepared answer wit is to discuss the start up procedures used by one of the fathers of all modern quality programs.

Deming who is often referred to as one the fathers of the quality movement started all his projects with a flowchart. In the New Economics, W. Edwards Deming says, you need to flowchart a process “To see it, to understand it, to change it”. Sometimes it took an hour other times it took days, but nothing else was done – until that was finished.

Posted by Howie Fenton on August 25, 2008 | Comments (2)