DEMO: Visual Diagramming

A picture is worth a thousand words. That's a famous saying, and what it's telling us is that I could go into an elaborate explanation of visually what I am seeing right now, and I would have to use a lot of words to describe exactly what I'm seeing. But if I just took a picture and showed you that, you would understand it just like that. That's what that saying is telling us.

Similarly, I could go into a big long explanation of what a computer network looks like using lots of words, or I could tell you about a project that I'm working on with lots of words. But instead, if I have a visual, something that we can actually see — how the computer network is laid out, or what the project looks like — now it can explain things in a better way. That's what visual diagramming does, and there's specific programs that allow us to do visual diagramming.

An Org Chart Example

Let's say we had an IT department and there is five people in this IT department. Fiona is the manager of the IT department. We have Grace, who helps manage the team but doesn't have any direct reports herself. Then we have Grace, Jose, Theo and Ed all report to Fiona.

Now, do you have a good visual of who reports to who and who's in charge? Probably — but it took a lot of words to explain exactly how this structure works. An org chart can help explain things in a much faster way. I don't need a bunch of words to do it. Not only that, but this visual helps me remember what the org chart actually looks like. I can see that Fiona is the manager of the group, that Grace helps her out, and also that Grace, Theo, Jose and Ed all report to Fiona. So it's a really simple way of explaining things.

Now imagine a company-wide who-reports-to-who, and it's a larger company. How do we explain all of that? With words, it would take a lot of words to do it. Or we have something like this, an org chart, that just explains it very simply and we can look things up very quickly.

Diagramming Programs

There are a lot of different visual diagramming programs. I just did it with PowerPoint — this is a PowerPoint slide right here, and it's showing out an org chart. So you can visual diagram with PowerPoint or with Microsoft Word, but there are specific programs that help us do this, like Lucidchart, Miro, SmartDraw, Gliffy and Microsoft Visio, that give us extra ways that we can organize and put things together for this visual diagramming. These can help us create great visual diagrams for whatever we're trying to visualize or whatever we're trying to represent.

Miro

Let's take a look at what Miro looks like. I've used Miro in the past at one of the companies I worked for, and one thing I love about it is that you can get a lot of people on it working with it all at the same time. You can see everybody moving around, and it's really collaborative.

Let's take a look at some of the options we have here. We can do roadmap planning, so if we want to plan out maybe a project, we could do that. We could do a sprint planning — if you're familiar with scrum, this is a way to do that. A product brief. Brainstorm, so this allows people to have little note cards just like you would have Post-it notes and write little things and stick it up on a board, so it allows us to do that. Customer journey mapping. There's a learning loop retro, there's flowcharts, there's mind maps. These are all different tools that we could use.

Roadmap Planning

Let's take a look at one of these — maybe we'll do roadmap planning and see what that looks like. We'll say let's get started. What we're looking at here is we've got dates, and we can create different activities. Maybe this item one here is a project, and so we call this — maybe we go in here and call this a different name and we call it project two here. So now we've got the project. Maybe we expect it to be a little bit longer, so we can then drag this out to be a little bit longer.

So as you can see here, what we've created is a visual diagram of how we're going to approach setting out this project. What is going to be, when do we expect to start, when are we expected to end with this, and we can map that all out. So this is an example of visual diagramming.

Flowcharts

Let's go ahead and take a look at another one. Here's a flowchart. I click on the flowchart, and what a flowchart is, it allows me to visually see the flow of maybe a decision tree where we're making decisions, or plan out how the customer journey is going to go, or plan out just some sort of workflow with this.

So what I'm going to do is center this, and now we can see that we have a workflow with this: a start, some sort of process, another process, a decision that needs to be made. This can visualize, like I say, a decision tree to help us make decisions, or help explain some sort of process. So this is another way that we could create a visualization that helps explain something.

Microsoft Visio

The other program that I wanted to show you is going to be Microsoft Visio. Visio is a program I've used for a long time to help map out networks — I'll put my network diagrams in here. We see that it has some basic flowcharts or org charts or other things that we can create as well, so it's very similar to Miro in some aspects. But one reason why I'll use this is because I can detail out things like a network diagram.

So here's a network diagram. I can open it up, and let's go ahead and see what it presents to us here. We can see this is a Microsoft program, so we see a lot of the similar features and a lot of the similar layout as a regular Microsoft program. But what we see over here on the left hand side is a bunch of stuff we could set up for our network. For instance, let's say we had a firewall: we can drag out a firewall and put it there. And then maybe we also have a server in here, so we can put a server in here. Maybe we have a copier, so we're going to put a copier in there. And then maybe we want to interconnect these, so I can then create connections to go from one to the other, and so then we can see the connections and how things are connected.

So this is another program that I've used that I think is a great program to map this out. Like I say, there's a lot of different options out there, so which one you choose might just depend on what you're trying to accomplish, how much collaboration you want to have, and what the purpose of it is. There are a whole host, and we're not going to go real in-depth into this.