How to Create a Process Landscape Diagram

Upload the Excel Sheet in the Dragon1 Viewer

Process layer of a layered Enterprise blueprint.

Five Ways of Creating a Process Landscape

Dragon1 provides you with 5 ways of creating a process landscape; Draw the process landscape in the Viewer or the Visual Designer, set the process landscape up in the Architecture Repository or Data Dashboard, or generate the process landscape by Uploading an Excel Sheet in the Viewer (via the Data Upload button).

Draw a Process Landscape in the Viewer

To draw a process landscape in the viewer:

Login via www.dragon1.com/login
Go the Viewer via www.dragon1.com/viewer
Click on the [+] New Atlas button.
Enter a name for the Atlas and select an Atlas template
The Editor is in Edit Mode. You can switch it to View Mode by clicking the Edit button (in the bottom button bar).
Select a page in the tree view
Click on the Visualization button
Select the process landscape template
Click OK.
Drag process shapes from the icons bar on the visualization
Click the Export button to export the data into an Excel Sheet.

To insert processes from the repository:

Click the Browser button
Select the cabinet where your processes are located
Select a process
Click on the Insert entity button.

To add views:

Click the Views button
Select a view in the dialog.
Edit the Action Script so it fits your needs.
Click on OK.
The view is added to the selected visualization

Click on the visualization to show the video.

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Process Diagram or Process Map is an architecture product that should be present in your EA baseline, even if it is out of date.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 common insights and overviews to a group of people, of relationships and dependencies between capabilities, processes, and activities.

Possessing something is more advantageous than having nothing, as it consistently conserves time and consequently reduces expenses spent on 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.

Process Landscape 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. You should not focus on department names, working instructions, or procedures. Instead, you should focus on process ownership, process 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.

How to Create a Process Landscape Diagram

An overview of the steps to take how to create a Process Landscape Diagram is here below:

Assignment
1. Think twice before creating a process landscape diagram without an assignment (of the proper owner/client).
2. Make an inventory of current problems with processes together with their users. Verify if processes to them are only manual processes (labor/work) or maybe also the automated information system/application/infrastructure processes.
3. Show an example Process landscape Diagram (see figure 3) to the owner/client (the COO) you want to get an assignment.
4. State the benefits of having a process map visualized, such as effective activity deduplication and rationalization, optimizing process output, managing complexity, or fewer misunderstandings with employees.
5. Get an assignment from the owner/client (COO) to create an AS-IS process map that afterward is used, managed, and updated.
6. Communicate you have been given the assignment to get sponsors and hands to help you.
Process Metamodel Example - Create a process meta-model as part of the modeling steps in the next list.
Modeling
1. Decide on a taxonomy (the theoretical structure) or re-engineer the ontology (the practical structure) of your business processes: How are processes decomposed in your opinion or according to the industry reference architecture? Are processes groups of activities, services, or functions? Are business functions groups of processes? Do business domains group processes across business systems? Do processes handle business objects? Etc..., Etc... Yes or No?
2. Define the sorts and types of entities: Do we differentiate between chain processes, business processes, and work processes? Do we decompose processes into steps, into activities, into tasks, and acts? Are they magnitudes of work? What is the workplace exactly?
3. Create a process meta-model (what entity classes are you going to use on the poster? Using a modeling language and the taxonomy or ontology in the step before.
4. You could also create an enterprise meta-model to relate your processes to products, processes, applications, and hardware devices. But focusing on processes is important now.
5. Write down the business rules that should apply: such as: Every business process is supported by not more than one core information system. Or: All financial activities should be in financial processes. Start up a background collection process for the inventory of all current business rules and process architecture principles.
6. Be sure to define every term you use on the process landscape.
Data Collection Example.
Data Collection - Filling up your user model
1. Make interview rounds with users and administrators of processes.
2. Collect information about your processes in an Excel sheet or an EA tool repository. Sometimes you can export data from a CMDB tool to start with.
3. When collecting information about processes, at least use the following attributes: a unique identifier, calling name, functional name, version, list of activities, list of business objects handled, list of interfaces and information, process cost, input, output, performance indicators, roles, list of process decisions, age.
4. Collect status information about the processes: do they comply with standards, criteria, business rules, and process architecture principles?
Creating a view - Setting a filter on the data in the user model
1. Make the context and scope clear on the visualization via the set of data you show. Include data on the organization and its business units in the view, resulting in a picture in the background to project the landscape on. Is the landscape created because of rationalization purposes or some other reason? Are we showing the whole company or just a business unit?
2. If you regard processes as service providers for groups of functionality, you should model and draw these. If you want to use the process landscape map to standardize on types of interfaces or to improve working with a single source of truth, you will have to model and draw types of interfaces and what source data is stored and handled where.
3. It is a best practice to collect more information (in detail and attributes) than you will show. This enables you, for instance, to report consolidated data and verify data.
4. If you are making the process landscape poster for the CFO, be sure to include financial data, if you are making the process landscape poster for the COO sure to include technical data, if you are making the process landscape poster for the COO sure to include processes and business continuity information.
Common Dragon1 Process Views are:
1. Management Overview
2. Business Functions View
3. Business Capabilities View
4. Replaceable Activities View
5. Loosely coupling view
6. Dependency View (of Processes, Business Objects and Activities )
7. Activities Reuse View
8. Duplicate Process Functions View
9. Obsolete & Outdated processes/capabilities/activities view (often call this the dead tree view)
10. Capability Dependency view (where are we depend on one employee for the work to be done)
11. Too Expensive processes / activities view
12. Single Point of Failure (SPOF) view
13. TCO View
14. Ownership view
15. Process Update Maintenance view
16. Competence vs Capabilities view
17. Role Decisions View
18. Information (Security) Leaks view
19. Business Architecture Principles View
20. Business Rules View
21. Open Standards vs Proprietary View
22. Industry Standards Compliancy View
23. Reference Architecture Compliancy View
Process Domain view example.
Visualizing - Giving a graphical representation of the process data in the view
1. Your process map should be in a version with and without issues and indicators. The one is used for strategic decision-making. The clean one is used for showing off.
2. Draw a business domain view (see Figure 2) of your process landscape. Link owners, managers, users, and process analysts to the business domains. Define and write down the scope and context of the domains, and how they are or should be managed. You work mainly with business domains to decomplex the process landscape. Write down carefully how these business domains interact. How dependent are they on each other?
3. Choose an optical overall pattern layout for your process landscape and a pattern layout per domain or business system. Example patterns are layers, bars, u-shapes, circles, random groups, or chaotic distribution. With a pattern, you immediately tell something. Just compare it with a landscape map of a city. That tells you if things are organized or not and what solutions are workable when solving certain problems. This goes also for your process map. You can have a business domain with supporting activities point to point related to one core activity. And in other domains, you may work with a service-oriented process.
4. Make sure you have different symbol/color combinations for different types of primary and supporting business and work processes. If you draw a garden you do not draw all the plants and trees in the same shape!
5. Always use a color scheme and font scheme and be sure to check out the company policy on logos, presentations, and fonts and colors.
6. Know that objects that are placed close to each other will seem to belong to each other. Work with repetition, rhythm, and proportionality to create the desired optical effects.
7. In Dragon1, we use a solid line to indicate currently an entity is there, a dotted line to indicate an entity was there, and a dashed line to indicate an entity will be there in the future.
8. A successful process landscape poster contains a lot of information the owner/client knows and likes to see and does not know and does not like to see (because of the situation), making him take action immediately.
Presenting
1. Have post-its ready when presenting the landscape. And have two versions printed: one with and one without indicators, alerts, and issues.
2. Take the Architecture View Layout of Dragon1 (see figure 1).
Administration, Usage and Management
1. Write down policy for using, administration (updating), and management of the process landscape.
2. Update the process landscape at least once every 3 months.

The benefits

The benefits of creating a process map are:

A lot of roles in the organization (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.
You as an architect give ideas to others that also could be visualized.
If you use 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).

Read also

If you are interested in more examples of Landscape Diagrams you might also want to read:

Extra

Every process landscape diagram implicitly has a meta-model. That meta-model at least contains the following entity classes:

business function
business system
business domain
process domain
process group
business service
process step
business components
business objects
business activity
business standards
process standards
process input criteria
process output criteria
process information
process architecture principles
activity cycles
business location
business environments

Everything in the process landscape needs to be uniquely identifiable. But it is important to work with a pure (meaningless) key, such as #PART0001 to #PART9999.

Get Started

We hope we have inspired you to start creating landscape diagrams.

Do you want to start immediately? You can purchase your Dragon1 PRO user license here online via the Store.

If you do not have the time and you need a Process Landscape on short notice, we can Create a Landscape for you.