Alright, so for this next module, we're actually going to get into a drawing tool, Microsoft Visio. And we're going to practice some of the visualization we're talking about. The one thing before we even get into the tool I would say about process capture and visualization is that you always want to kind of start with handwritten notes. This may seem kind of, you know, clunky and manual. But generally, this is an example and kind of the base what we're gonna start with today for this live screencast, or what you might normally start with. The reason I usually recommend, especially if you're just starting out with process mapping process capturing visualization, is because the tools can be very difficult to get used to there can be a learning curve to the tools.

So you don't want to conflate sort of the frustration of getting your head around the process information and learning how to use the tool at the same time because Microsoft Visio included a lot of the tools out there already. Drawing Tools, they're not really opinionated process mapping tools. So that difference means that you have to put a lot of your own structure and mapping language into it. Which is why so far in this course, we've been talking about the five W's, and trying to prep you guys to have a structure. So you can actually get in and do this stuff yourself. So with that being said, I wrote down like a process sample here in the KV mapping language that we've been sharing.

So you see terminals, you see boxes, or squares with activities in them. And then you see roles actually, in the shorthand version in little circles, because it's hard to draw swimlanes on paper and keep everything organized. And you also see in the brackets, I wrote a dash M for email, email, here's written out phone. There's a bunch of shorthand kind of things here. And this is how when you're thinking about process, you can just kind of get in your own groove about taking the notes, but think about using the language that we've been talking about with you've got three shapes, you've got ovals are terminals, you've got squares, and you've got diamonds. And that's all you need.

So just try to think about what you do in your day to day activity in this language. So you can see here, this is a pretty small business example, where you have a solopreneur, or a single sort of person running business, open sales, and you're qualifying leads, you're scheduling calls, you're following up to do things, you've got different types of, you know, things going on decisions. So let's see what this looks like. Now, these are all notes if I start to map them. So I'm going to slide this onto a screen that's out of your vision, so I can refer to it and then I'm gonna pull up Microsoft Visio. So again, Visio is Microsoft's tool, but I would recommend anything that you like, there's web based applications, such as lucid charts, draw.io.

And I graphics, I think is another one, but there's really a ton of them. So if you want to draw process diagrams, then you really just got to find what fits your work style. So what you see here is I've loaded up the cabbie template, the process mapping template, but you Do this on the base template, you don't need a template, you can also just do it on a blank sheet of paper. So it's kind of like some of the rules we summarized. And then you've got a blank page with some swim lanes in it. So let's just start to look at how this might look like to map a little bit because I know this can be intimidating.

And in this module, we only have a few minutes, but I'm going to show you how it gets started. So again, if you have notes like this, or you've just written them on paper, and you got a paper at your desk, the biggest thing is just start pulling shapes and just writing in them. And you can see the way this interface and a lot of drawing interfaces work is I've got the the steps here loaded up, but you can find these shapes in most applications. But you just drag things onto the screen, you've got your ovals, you've got your squares and you've got your diamonds. So usually you just left click drag and start drawing. So in this case, there's one roll there's founder, so I'm going to go ahead and put that in the swim lane and again, you can make your own swim lanes depending on the application you're using them for clarity, I'm going to go ahead and delete some of these others some lanes.

All right, so let's spread this out. So the first step in my rough notes are qualified lead. And in our language we put that's the what, and the who, or is the founder over here. And the where is this is usually an email. So I'm going to start there. Boom, I've just written the first step in my process map.

Again, I'm dragging a new square. And it's asking me in my, in my template for the work I do, it's asking me for the system. As a reminder, this next step is also email. So I'm just really transcribing my notes. I'm not gonna worry too much about spacing right now. So let's say try to schedule call and send service introduction deck.

And again, this can be in your own language, and then in Microsoft Visio. I've got a quick kind of shortcut to connect these two. So step one, step two, I can also come up here and use the connector function and draw different connectors. But that's pretty much it, whether from your notes, or whether you want to play around in the tool. There's different tools that do different things, but you're just connecting steps. You're adding decisions.

And it's simple drawing. And this is how you start to really tie your process story together. And what you're going to realize is, if you're keeping it in this language, the five w language, there's a bunch of things that have to be present information to make this story makes sense each box connect the right way and tell the right story. So you just kind of plug away and then you can think about different formatting, how you want to fit all the shapes on the page if you want to use multiple detail levels I'll be talked about, but the biggest thing is just get in here and the exercise in this course, and really find a drawing application and start structuring process information. That's it. So if I if I had another 30 minutes, I can draw all the shapes on my kind of hand drawn nodes.

And for this hand drawn note, it ends up kind of looking like this in the end. So then you basically have a process map where you can structure different notes, you can write, you know, different detailed manuals associated with the steps. There's a lot of things you can do with process maps. And that's what the whole training is about. First, you need to tell your process story and then you can better manage the process. So as we finish towards the course or get to the end of the course, we're going to talk about maybe an exercise, and then we're going to talk about where this goes from here, especially for solopreneurs