A picture's worth a thousand words. But diagrams are difficult to draw…

Nightmare! Earlier this week at work, I wasted a good few hours attempting to draw a diagram. “Wasted” because, shock horror, it wasn’t a very successful attempt. The awful truth is that I can’t draw to save my life.

I’d love to blame the tools, but since I’m trying to be a better workman, I won’t do that. The tool in question is Microsoft PowerPoint. The scene is my lounge: me with my trusty laptop, alongside a strong pot of coffee for moral support. The task is this:

Explain your six-month product vision to your team, your boss and your customers. Leave no one confused, and everyone enlightened.

Let me go back a bit and fill in some of the back-story. The software product my team develops is great and all, but it has a knack for leaving our users in tears. There are various “product features” (yep, you guessed it, I’m using that term loosely) that hinder our users in their day-to-day jobs. So, I’m hosting a conference call for some of our disgruntled users, and during this call I’ll describe how we plan to fix it all.

Feature, n. A bug that has been documented.

Because of the scale of the task, it struck me that a diagram was the way to tackle it. If I were to do it in speech, I’d want to cover:

• The current problems we’re facing
• The proposed changes to the architecture
• Reasons why it simplifies the product
• Some blurb about how this is the right approach to take. In other words, plead for approval.

Now I’m sure this can all be said in a diagram, but I sure as hell haven’t figured out how. I needed a sort of process diagram, showing the various nouns and connecting them with verbs—a user submits a request to the build server which kicks off this automation task that reports to a database—but when I started it just looked crap. A bit like this.

An epic failure of a PowerPoint diagram

The concise diagram I had in my head ended up as a series of soulless boxes and arrows, all very bland and yes, I’m too ashamed to show you the end result.

Am I the only one with this problem? I’d like to think not. On the day of the conference call, two things happened:

1. I decided against using the presentation and just talked instead.
2. I questioned my teammates if any of them could teach me how to make awesome PowerPoint diagrams.

One of the answers I got was you can’t; just stick with text. The other answer I got was do it the old-fashioned way, with a paper and a pen. That struck me and a damn good idea: one quick visit to Waterstone’s and I’ve now got this sitting beside me:

What fun awaits?

I haven’t made an attempt yet to draw anything, but I’ll keep you posted…