Record actors, states and evidence separately

A process diagram becomes hard to use when people, system states and documents are mixed into the same set of boxes. Keep them separate even if the first version is only a working note.

Actors are the people or services responsible for doing something. Use roles rather than names: requester, coordinator, approver, finance operator, scheduled job, external service. A role may move between people during the day, and one person may perform several roles. The distinction matters because replacement software should assign authority to the role, not preserve an accidental dependency on a particular person.

States describe what the work currently means. "Submitted", "waiting for information", "approved", "rejected" and "completed" can be useful if everyone interprets them the same way. Status labels from the old application may hide several different conditions. A record marked "open" might be untouched, being investigated, waiting on the requester or blocked by another system. If those conditions lead to different actions, they need to be identified separately before anyone designs a status field.

Evidence is what lets another person confirm the state or decision. It can be a submitted form, approval message, generated receipt, source document, timestamped event or reconciliation record. Evidence should be attached to the relevant transition. A final folder containing every artefact is less useful when nobody can tell which item justified an approval or change.

For each step, capture a small set of facts:

• the actor who starts it;
• the state required before it can begin;
• the information the actor reads;
• the decision or action they perform;
• the state produced afterwards;
• the evidence retained;
• the next role expected to act.

Those notes expose gaps without turning discovery into a complete technical specification. They also keep the proposed product organised around changes in the work rather than around pages in the old application.

Check ambiguous verbs as they appear. "Process", "handle", "review" and "manage" often compress several decisions. Replace them in the working notes with what actually happens. A person may validate an identifier, compare an amount, request missing information and then assign a category. Those actions need different data and can fail in different ways.