How to create an Effective Activity Diagram?

Projects are done by series of tasks, activities and responsibilities assigned to people to arrive at a specific goal. Using diagrams describe the whole business process and its system. Drawing an activity diagram helps improve a process; it may be simplified if it is too complex or it can become detailed when very specific and limited. It does not only show the steps to be performed, but how are these done. More so, it is used to show the methods, functions and operations that exist in the system.

Mainly because it impossible to explicitly describe parallel events, diagrams are well suited for the illustration of business processes, since business processes rarely occur in a linear manner.

 

The Workflow

Diagrams may have shapes like any other graphical representations and may also use arrows to show directions and relationships. There are several types of diagrams which are widely used in the business systems. In some diagrams, the activities are written inside the boxes or nodes and also known as activity on node diagram. In some cases, these activities are written on arrows and therefore called as activity on arrow diagram.  Most companies prefer the latter because the former is quite confusing to use.

 

How to Draw an Activity Diagram?

There steps to draw an Activity Diagram properly and accurate as possible.

1. Identify the tasks, activities or responsibilities to be done in the whole project. You may write them inside the boxes or arrows. Just make sure that the shapes have the same size to appear presentable.
2. Should you have additional information or ideas about a particular task, write it inside the box itself, or outside of it. The point is, it should be near the box.
3. Arrange all the tasks the sequence that they should be done. Put the early tasks on the left and the later tasks on the right. Do the arrangement horizontally. You may arrange and rearrange everything to get it right.
4. Use arrows. Use arrows to show the next step and as to where it is leading. To be more specified, put a box with the word start on the left-most side and end in the box on the right-most side to serve as a guide.

 

Conclusion

Diagrams show scenarios formed by internal interaction of sequence of actions. With a diagram, it produces a clear visual presentation of the entire process and the communication that will take place among the project team members. These are intended to model both computational and organizational processes. Diagrams show the activity plan for delegation of tasks, partition, action, object, control, and possible outcomes. Diagrams can be formulated in various types of detail. These can also be refined step by step to fit the process. Using diagrams give the whole project team a road map on how to do series of tasks in a more comprehensible and readable manner. It will help the whole team to achieve the target goal because there is a guide to be used and specific stages to be followed.