I've written before about using OpenProj as a suitable open-source application for project management. Now that I've more chance to use it in anger (e.g. with projects consisting of over 200 tasks), I've noticed a number of anomalies. Mainly these occur in the scheduling.

I posted earlier about a diagram of vtiger's data schema. The actual scheme is referenced at vtiger's wiki.

It is not an ERD (Entity Relationship Diagram) nor is it a Class Model. That's what I was originally looking for since I spend more of time working at the logical or conceptual levels rather than the physical.

What's Vtiger?

Vtiger is an open-source CRM suite, originally forked from SugarCRM due to the commercial activities of the SugarCRM team. Vtiger aims to be open-source, although it does have the possibility of purchasable extensions, much like Joomla. There is a lot of history in the fork, much of it best left alone. The main point to remember is that SugarCRM and Vtiger are released under different licences. You need to check that the functionality you require is available under the licence you wish to use.

I was curious about the relationships between Contacts, Accounts, Leads and Potentials, so I needed a reverse engineering package.

Fabforce Designer/MySQL Workbench

FabForce Designer was a great little application on Windows and seems to have stagnated a little under MySQL's auspices. It's recently been released for OS X, but the recent release requires 10.5 (Leopard) and I'm still on 10.4 (Tiger).

How would you process map a cup of tea?

I once had a recruiter vet me based on whether I could process map a cup of tea. I think he was new to the job and was fed a script from his client.

What's the actual answer?

Firstly, a cup of tea isn't a process. You can't map a cup of tea. It's an object, not a process. You can process map the process of making a cup of tea, but not the cup of tea itself.

The industries of Stock Photography and Stock Music have a lot of similarities.

Stock Agencies

Both rely on artists submitting their creations to agencies. The agencies are changing the way in which the artists interact with the customers of the art. Importantly for the artist, the agencies are devaluing the art resulting in the art becoming commoditised. Unfortunately, the artist is at the end of the chain and is also becoming commoditised.

Introduction

In the previous article in the Fundamentals of Processing Mapping series, I introduced the concept and use of swimlanes in process mapping. In this article, I want to expand on how the swimlanes are connected by introducing messages.

At the end of the previous article in the Process Mapping Fundamentals series, I mentioned that I'd written the processes from two different perspectives. Swimlanes allow you to display who does what in a simple and easy-to-understand way, allowing you to combine the activities of several people and roles into one diagram.

Now with the increasing size of memory cards, most of us have become all too accustomed to snapping at anything. After all, we can separate out the keepers from the trash back in the office.

Delete in the field?

I used to have a policy of not deleting any photo out in the field, but I stopped this a couple of years ago. Now I'm much happier with fewer images and a higher ratio of shots:keepers.

I've been asked to help someone out with a process map and although my first advice was to draft it on paper, then we can figure out what it should actually look like, my second point was to ask what software was available. I'd already guessed that there would be no formal process mapping software, let along Business Process Management suite that I'd have liked to have seen. I was at the point of hoping for MS Visio, as a diagramming tool, it works, but it does mean that you have to capture the rest of the process description elsewhere.