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Process mapping - drill-downs and creating child diagrams

How to send activities to drill down to simplify your process

Updated over 6 months ago

Often, live or online mapping sessions generate too much detail on a single diagram. The diagram needs to be simplified from a hierarchical structure into fewer, higher level activity boxes, with detail pushed down to lower levels under appropriate high-level summary activities.

Article outline

  • Prerequisites

  • Drill-downs

  • Undo "send to child"

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Prerequisites

  • Registered and verified Elements account

Drill-downs

So if you have already mapped too much detail at this level, you can select a number of activity boxes to be moved into a child diagram, replacing them with an activity box with a drill-down.

Why not have a look at this short video snippet:

To "send to child" you select a number of objects. Then right mouse click and select “send to child”.

Notice that Elements will "send to child" only those objects which you have selected. So, in this example, if you had wanted to send the outputs from boxes 6 and 7, you would have had to select those too.

It will create a new activity box, with "What?" as the text. As usual, double click to edit this text.

If you then click on the drill-down (blue corner with box number) on box 13 (the activity box with a drill-down), you would get to the detail. Note that the diagram title is “What?” by default, so to modify that you need to click on SWITCH TO EDIT and open the right panel using the right panel icon, where you can edit the diagram title.

Undo "send to child"

You cannot just “undo” a "send to child" since this action creates a new activity, drills down on that activity, and creates and takes you to a new diagram. You can manually undo the action by:

  • copying what you sent to child (Ctrl+A on diagram/Cmd+A on Mac);

  • going back up a level to the original parent diagram;

  • pasting onto the diagram; or

  • deleting the new activity with the drill-down that was created by doing the “send to child” action in the first place.

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