How To Create a Process Landscape Diagram

Three Ways of Creating a Process Landscape

Process layer of a layered Enterprise blueprint.

Dragon1 provides three ways of creating a process landscape: Draw the process landscape in the Viewer, set the process landscape up in the Data Dashboard, or generate the process landscape by uploading an Excel Sheet (via the Data Upload button).

Why do you start creating Process Landscape Diagrams?

A Process Landscape Diagram, Process Diagram, or Process Map is an architecture product that should be present in your EA baseline, even if it is out of date.

A process landscape always creates shared insights and overviews for people on relationships and dependencies between capabilities, processes, and activities.

Possessing something is more advantageous than having nothing, as it consistently conserves time and reduces expenses spent searching for interdependencies within a particular process or activity. Additionally, armed with a process landscape, one can engage in efficient process redesign and optimization.

What is a Process Landscape Diagram?

A process landscape is a coherent set of interconnected processes often within an enterprise, business, or organization. A process landscape diagram or map is the visualization of a process landscape.

dragon1 process mapping landscape diagram

Process Mapping Diagram.

Showing the logical and physical structure, grouping, modularity, functionality, and technology of business processes and working processes.

Sometimes, together with the business functions, business services, capabilities and activities, they are related to where, what business objects are handled, the information they communicate, the organizational departments, locations, and environments they are in, but also the users and their roles who execute the processes.

Defining a strict boundary for what should or shouldn't be included in the overview visualization is challenging. It largely depends on the interests and preferences of the viewer, particularly stakeholders. Comparably, when observing a garden landscape, there may be art and statues present, but if they're not the focus of your attention, you might not even notice them.

You will accomplish a lot with process diagrams, depending on what information about the processes you provide. It would be best not to focus on department names, working instructions, or procedures. Instead, it would focus on ownership, costs, and business benefits.

Whether you have a modest 20 business processes or an extensive 2000, they can always be accommodated on an A0-sized poster format. The key lies in the quality of execution. This step-by-step guide is designed to assist you in achieving this.

The benefits of Process Architecture Maps

The benefits of creating a process map are:

Many organizational roles (COO, CFO, CIO, administrator, supplier, manager, architect) have much quicker access to information to make decisions.
A visualization of a process is much more objective and easier to understand (harder to misunderstand) than a textual version.
The impact of change can be visualized on the drawing table before you do it in practice. Showstoppers can be eliminated.
You, as an architect, show how well it works to visualize the whole of a complex system and then manage it instead of working with textual documents with partially inconsistent drawings.
As an architect, you give ideas to others that could be visualized.
Using a visual data tool to create a landscape poster, you can try different scenarios to solve problems.

Managing Processes

When you have your process landscape map, you can use color and lines, for instance, to indicate where and what processes are not compliant with the company standards and principles, what optimization of activities goes wrong, or what business objects cannot be handled correctly because of a certain situation.

You can also gray out the process map and only colorize the items in scope for a certain project or situation. Of course, this is all much easier to do with a specialist tool like Dragon1 as a BPM Tool than with a generic tool or basic BPM Tool like PowerPoint, Visio, or Archi (Open Source).