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Best Practices to capture a NAC Workflow for Documentation

  • 3 June 2023
  • 2 replies
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Garrett
Userlevel 6
Badge +16

What is the Best Practices to capture a NAC Workflow for Documentation purposes?

Since NAC doesn’t not have a feature to export or print the workflow, what can be done to capture the workflow for Documentation purposes? Some methods which I currently utilize is to:

  • Screen capture - snip and stitch into a single large image.
    + Great for a single time.
    -  Painful if have to do it weekly. Configuration is not capture
  • Diagram it with Visio, Lucidchart or Draw,io
  • Write Pseudocode using a programming language like Python
    + Linear and conditional flow is easy to replicate
    - State Machine harder to replicate with “switch” structure.  

Is there going to be a PRINT or EXPORT feature for NAC? 

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Best answer by Jake 5 June 2023, 16:03

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Jake
Userlevel 5
Badge +13

Hi @Garrett 

 

This is definitely a topic that I hear quite a bit and I would suggest taking a look on the https://Ideas.nintex.com portal to see if anything matches, I agree we should allow for some kind of mapping export to give you a high level view for convenience.

 

However at the moment the official Nintex approach would be to use and maintain a Process Manager map that the workflow feeds from, rather than the workflow its self dictating the procedure, you use Process Manager to map the procedure as a whole and attach workflows as part of said proceedure.

 

There are however definitely plans to create some element of bi-directional updating in the future but they are sort of early in planning.

 

The reason why this approach is preferred is as follows: 

  1. Workflow maps are technical and fully practical, they are not simple and easy to understand and generally contain complex structures of logic that is irrelevant to the procedure but required for workflow, taking workflow as a basis in this case will just create complex and difficult to manage maps.
  2. Workflows generally are not the whole process but rather part of a process, If you take a snapshot of a procedure from a workflow level you will likely miss out key details in the wider process not included in workflow, capturing the process from Process Manager gathers the full simplistic view and explains well where the workflow elements exist.
  3. Procedure and Practical rarely match up, There is an element of designing processes that is difficult to map, this is the fact that the concept of a procedure and how it ‘should’ execute rarely matches that of how it ‘actually’ executes, maintaining maps from a workflow level may be impractical as this is the actual execution, changes tracked here in detail may not add any value to the overall procedure, for example if I decide to add a loop to store my comment in a HTML code for better presentation this adds no value to the procedure and ultimately is noise. If the focus on mapping is from a Process Manager side, this is handled by the business and process champions to create a great place for the business to describe what it is they do, that can then be interpreted by technical colleagues to automate that as they see fit.  

I hope this helps answer your question

TLDR, not exactly but we do, its just not directly a part of automation cloud, we use Process Manager for mapping processes. 

Jake
Garrett
Userlevel 6
Badge +16

Hi @Jake 

Thanks for your response. Its was enlightening to read about Process Manager for mapping processes. 

However, I don’t have access to this Process Manager tool (or my organization is not allowing me access). From what you have stated, Process Manager seems to be high-level requirement toolset. The diagram from Process Manager is similar to a swim-lane diagram

 

 

Until something better comes along, I guess I have to stick with screen captures, diagrams (swim lanes, flowcharts) and pseudocode to document a NAC workflow.

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