Sub-steps in frameworks

What is the challenge?

Frameworks can be quite complicated. For example, the Aha! Framework breaks down to 3 levels of granularity and as business processes go, it's pretty simple and clean.

Bigger organisations are complex systems with many moving parts that need to interoperate, carefully managing how change to any part of the system will result in expected and unexpected consequences.

Frameworks is a fantastic way to visualise these systems, their various inputs, processes, outputs and relationships.

Steps detail the system and need to represent their inter-relationships with other parts of the system. At the moment, they are flat. Each step is structurally equal to all the others.

What is the impact?

A flat structure means greater simplicity. Introducing a hierarchy would add greater complexity and with it, greater flexibility and a richer, truer representation of a system from macro down to micro.

With a more sophisticated model, it would be possible to communicate a given system more easily at different layers to different stakeholder groups.

Describe your idea

Introduce a hierarchy to steps, be able to group steps within parent, grandparent, etc steps. (similar to strategic roll-up and the workspace hierarchy)

Ability to rename step levels to represent processes that occur in different levels of an organisation. (similar to the workspace line label field)

Ability to link steps with record relationships like depends on, blocks etc.

Ability to create record relationships using the connector tool "convert to record relationship".

Ability to convert frames to steps and automatically assign steps created within them as child steps

And probably a lot more ideas too...