Depending on your choice of tool you may decide to select different metadata for your task library. What is metadata anyway?
The best description I heard was many years ago, and it’s simply the data about the data. So that does sound a little like a riddle. What it means for a task is the following:
- A consistent way of describing elements within or surrounding a task or activity, so everyone uses the elements in the same way when defining a task
- Clear, precise and concise terminology describing task elements or the parts that make up the task
- A map between the visual image and the data captured for the task
For the purposes of building a task library, I am going to ignore for now, other symbols or elements that will be important when you turn the tasks into a process. (e.g. connectors, links, and other labels).
As we have some bias here for simplicity, let’s look at the minimum you will want to capture for task metadata and details. The TaskMap model includes the following for documenting a task:
- Responsible and supporting roles
- Task Description (what has to be done)
- Task Identifier (number or label to uniquely describe the task in use)
- Guidelines (rules, policies and procedures to be following in executing the task)
- Resources (Tools, systems or materials needed to do the work)
- Frequency of occurrence
- Time taken to complete the task
- Notes to support some or all of the above
The following is an illustration of how these appear on a legend for the reader to follow the task details visually.
