process mapping - software, guides, suggestions?

Obviously you can use power point and word to do flow charts or visio - is there any other software which is useful?

Any guides/ How to's/ standards books which are useful?

Any other suggestions recommendations?

Visio is how I roll!

XSol is a bit of a local standard that works well if you really want to put the time into setting it all up - can model costs and resource usage etc for various process scenarios, link through to the application functions themselves etc etc

If you just want to draw a process though, Visio.

Heh I was (somewhat) involved with Xsol when working for one of their first customers. I wasn't involved with the actual mapping however, just the automation implementation.

Good to see they're still going strong.

I considered their mapping software but i'm more interested in the approach rather than the actual doing.

What do you mean by this? You want to know best-practice for modelling processes?

Yeah best practice but also any recommendations, things to watch out for and ways to make things simpler.

I wont be the one spending the next few months doing in but i want to make sure the mapping process starts off on the right foot in the right direction.

I've found some BPM guides online and a contact who does it for a job to ask some questions of.

We might end up with Xsol process mapping but i dont want to get too focused on one thing for the moment.

Certainly if you're doing process mapping, the software to draw it up in is the last consideration.
Proper facilitation, process disaggregation, understanding meta-processes against strategy etc...