Enhancing Business Productivity through Effective Workflow Management

Workflow What a user needs

What is workflow? In a business environment, workflow is the heart of the daily process In your personal usage of applications, you want to Get to your content easily Navigate with minimum effort Have all information clear, simple and visually appealing It s the same in a business application

Business workflows Each employee has tasks they need to accomplish And each task has some rules that need to be followed Rules: Basic steps related to one single user Usually around completeness and correctness of information This is a personal workflow People sometimes just keep checklists of what they need to do, but software *should* do it for them Interconnected steps where work is handed off from one user to another There are rules for hand-offs and approval from UserAto move to UserB Approval workflows should handle these A->B steps We will largely for on Personal Workflows

Keys to successful workflows Enhanced productivity by eliminating errors Also by removing redundant steps Ability to track the process and uncover opportunities for improvement Basic data-mining Auditing and regulation adherence Ensures process consistency and reliability across various departments

For personal workflows As a software engineer you want to apply these guidelines to your UI/ application design Check data inputs Provide meaningful and understandable displays Language, captions, hints Prevent errors Data checks again, but prevent execution of errors (don t let them hurt themselves) Cover all necessary actions But also don t add unnecessary actions

Your CRUD needs Think of the main actions and the navigation Where does the user start? What do they first see? List (in your head) what main actions they need to perform How can the user tell from the first screen they see where to go for each action Now design screens for each of those actions

Your screen needs What information should be shown Where should it be shown (same page, different page, popup?) How do they know where to click, what to type? Can you error check as they type? Or after they click something? What message do you give on errors? Can you pinpoint their mistake for them? If they want to give up , how can they do that?

Example workflows for discussion New Employee Onboarding Sales Order Travel Request Authorization Employee Recruitment Product feature request IT bug tracking Vacation Requests Workflows Document Approvals Workflow Purchase Orders Workflow Expense Claim Requests Workflows Many of these would align with your department

Testing Workflows Testing is always an essential part of the software lifecycle Most often unit testing is emphasized - Simpler, fewer dependencies - Relies on the individual However, workflows are real user needs, and also must be tested This includes the most difficult form of testing the UI Let s try that out with some UI automation software (selenium)