Workflow?
2002-07-25 22:25:53+00 by
Dan Lyke
5 comments
After this morning's whine and a trip to Stacey's Books at lunch, I'm wondering if anyone has some suggestions on books or resources on workflow that predate XML and the whole "content management on the web" thing. I've seen a bunch of processes at work, I have some ideas on how workflow should progress, but I'd like to see other opinions about it, both as it relates to computers, and as it relates to businesses and manufacturing processes in general.
[ related topics:
Books Content Management Work, productivity and environment
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comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment made: 2002-07-25 23:39:26+00 by:
ziffle
Can you be more specific?
#Comment made: 2002-07-26 01:26:02+00 by:
dws
You might find some info by following the links from http://www.micro-workflow.com/
#Comment made: 2002-07-26 08:59:45+00 by:
john doe
I'd been thinking similar thoughts and decided it was basically systems analysis. I did a bit of research and ended up buying
Systems Engineering and Analysis (Blanchard & Fabrycky) (used, of course)
I've only just started but I like it so far -- it's straightforward and logical. I'm a little scared of the math I see ahead, but I'm going to try.
Workflow is just part of it, it's like taking a step back and thinking about all of the processes in the life cycle of a company in a fairly rigorous way, at many levels of abstraction from the nitty-gritty to the big picture.
In that way it reminds me of what I've read about object-oriented programming.
(Although with that, I'm fine with the theory but my eyes glaze over at the implementation.)
#Comment made: 2002-07-26 13:35:51+00 by:
ziffle
Of course I recommend 'Out Of The Crisis' by E Deming. The system should be designed to emit quality out the end, regardless of how out of focus any single point is. An interesting oldy is Brooks 'Mythical Man Month' where he talks about boundary conditions.
Toyota comes to mind. They turn out flawless (statistically) products.
#Comment made: 2002-07-26 16:40:12+00 by:
Dan Lyke
Thanks, of the last few projects I've worked on, all have involved passing around chunks of data that had some sort of routing system efore they got published, and to a lesser extent some security concerns. Much of that data was actually at the file level of granularity, so it isn't too hard to decide on clustering of files, what goes where, and to whom, and making publish points so that documents aren't shared while their modification is in progress, but it seems like this is code that I should be able to write once more and forget. I just want to cover all the bases.
I'll try to ramble a little more on the topic over the next few days.