UPN LO3-1: Understanding your intent and audience

Audience participation should extend from on-stage to backstage to under the stage

– David Lee Roth

When we create information we sometimes might not be clear about our intent or, worse, tend to forget for who we are creating this information in the first place: our audience.

The combination of intent and the way we engage with our audience is critical for success.  So, before you start to document your processes, ask yourself:

  1. WHAT IS MY INTENT
  2. WHO IS MY AUDIENCE

When we engage with a wide variety of stakeholders, such as business subject matter experts, end-users, business analysts, developers, we need to be aware that each of these has its own specific expertise, experience, and skills. From a process notation point of view, a developer probably wants way more detail and rigor than, say, an end-user. But you cannot engage with an end-user using complicated language. Or engage with a developer using too less details and rigor.

So, what is the best of these 2 extremes? You guessed it: Universal Process Notation! The idea is that the notation is both simple enough to be easily understood by everybody in the business and strong enough in order to form a contextual place for analysis and development. UPN has its origin in a combination of IDEF, Functional Flow Block Diagrams and critical thinking about business justification (answering the business why of an activity).

This all means that developers (or any other SME) can continue using their language, but in the overall context of an easier to interpret overall business-friendly notation. People new to diagramming will also find it easier to learn. 

So, there is nothing wrong with other notation & approaches (e.g. BPMN, UML, Flowcharts, DFD’s, Gantt charts, Pert diagrams, FFBD’s, IDEF, Petri nets; see this source) but the Universal Process Notation keeps information readable for carbon lifeforms.
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