Choosing Quality Tools (Mind Map vs. Flowchart vs. Spaghetti Diagram) Artwork

Quality during Design

Quality during Design is the podcast for engineers and product developers navigating the messy front end of product development. Each episode gives you practical quality and reliability tools you can use during the design phase — so your team catches problems early, avoids costly rework, and ships products people can depend on.

You'll hear solo episodes on early-stage clarity, risk-based decision-making, and quality thinking, along with conversations with cross-functional experts in the series A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts.

If you want to design products people love for less time, less cost, and a whole lot fewer headaches — this is your place.

Hosted by Dianna Deeney, consultant, coach, and author of Pierce the Design Fog. Subscribe on Substack for monthly guides, templates, and Q&A.

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Quality during Design

Choosing Quality Tools (Mind Map vs. Flowchart vs. Spaghetti Diagram)

November 24, 2021 • Dianna Deeney • Episode 39

0:00 | 14:42

Within our quality toolbox, there are a lot of graphical organizers. Some are better at fulfilling different goals than others. If we have a goal in mind, then we may choose a certain tool. However, we don’t want analysis paralysis about which tool is best to stop us from using any tool at all.

I share my 3 general guidelines about choosing a graphical quality tool, how to draw them, and when to use them.

Plus, we talk about 3 tools in particular, prompted by a social media ask: mind map, process flowchart, and spaghetti diagram. We get into what they are, when we're most likely to use them, and how they can be used for design.

Visit the podcast blog for links to suggested resources and videos.

If you’d like to get more into process flow charting, then there are two previous Quality During Design episodes I recommend:

Episode 29 “Types of Design Analyses possible with User Process Flowcharts” talks about a lot of various analyses we can do with a process flow chart, like identifying important tasks, making the process more efficient, and performing a costs analysis.

Episode 2 “My product works. Why don't they want it?” talks about a process flow chart for the user’s process and the appropriate level of detail we may need to identify the true customer needs and requirements for our design.

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ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.