Glossary and Preferred Values

Glossary

The Glossary exists in the Library menu. It allows you to see the values entered against a property (or a set of properties) and on the right hand side gives you a count of the number of distinct values.

The following sets of properties share their values:

• Participants, Business Owners and Experts
• Inputs and Outputs
• Customers and Suppliers

For each value a description can be provided; more than likely this will not be used as there is no need to restrict the length of the value, it could be > 500 characters. There is a checkbox to indicate whether the value is a preferred value for the property or set of properties.

For each value there is a green arrow button "Where Used" which when clicked opens a dialog box showing the Spaces, Processes and Activities where the value has been used. The Activities tab is useful when there are some obvious rogue values to be corrected as there is a hyperlink which will take you right to the process and activity where the value should be corrected.

It is not possible to restrict the values displayed in a property, a user can enter whatever they like, however, it is possible to provide a set of values that the user may select from - the preferred values.

Preferred Values

The Preferred check box can be used on those property values which you wish to appear when the user goes to enter a value in the property on a process, activity, gateway or other type of item. Preferred values are set at the Account level.

The set of preferred values for the property are displayed as soon as the cursor enters the field, and one of these can be selected. If there is a long list then as soon as the first character is entered the preferred values are restricted to those values that start with that character.

Preferred values also have a place to play when merging values in the Glossary. When you hover over a property value in the Glossary there is a Merge checkbox which you can select. Multiple values can be selected and a dialog box displays "Merge n Values" as a green button; when selected:

• if none of the values are a preferred value then a radio button requires you to select one as the value against which the other values are merged,
• if one of the values is a preferred value then it assumes that the other values will be replaced by the preferred value,
• if multiple preferred values were selected to be merged - then take care the chances are that you hovered over the wrong record !

A value in the glossary, whether preferred (or not), can also be renamed by clicking on the value and typing a new value; you will get a Rename Value confirmation box.

Setting up a standard set of Preferred Values for each Account

Preferred Values are used by processes and decisions. If you have several Blueworks Live Accounts, perhaps one for each client project then a Process can be created solely for the purpose of defining the set of preferred values for the account. The values can be entered against the Process, Milestone or Activity in the Discovery Map. You can enter at least 50 values for each property, perhaps more.

If you have a lot of preferred values you might consider breaking these up into multiple activities. For example, if there is a large suite of software products where each product has modules and applications, consider one Milestone for each Product, one Activity for each Module and on each activity enter multiple values one for each Application.

The process can be exported and imported into a new account and if a client is only using a subset of the products available then the Milestone and Activities for the products which are not used can simply be deleted.