Artifact Modeling

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Introduction

After you have created your artifact sets, the next step will be to model your artifacts. Here, you will identify your flow items — artifacts carrying business value — and model their states into flow states. This allows Viz to generate Flow Metrics — measuring your artifacts speed and efficiency as they flow across the value stream.

Modeling your Artifacts

To begin modeling your artifacts, click the Artifact Modeling tab.

The first step is to model your relevant artifact types into flow items. A Flow Item is a unit of business value pulled by a stakeholder through a product’s value stream.

Note: If a project included in your artifact set(s) does not contain any artifacts, it will not appear on the Artifact Modeling screen.

If your artifacts do not have a one-to-one match to the available flow items, or if you'd like to whittle down the set of artifacts used to generate Flow Metrics, you can apply a condition.

To learn more about flow items, click the help icon on the Artifact Modeling screen or refer to the table below.

Flow Item	About this Flow Item	Examples
Feature	Delivers New business value Pulled By Customers Description New value added to drive a business result; visible to the customer	Feature Epic User Story Requirement
Defect	Delivers Quality Pulled By Customers Description Fixes for quality problems that affect the customer experience	Defect Bug Problem Incident Change
Risk	Delivers Security, governance, compliance Pulled By Security and risk officers Description Work to address security, privacy, and compliance exposures	Vulnerability Regulatory Requirement Security Issue
Debt	Delivers Removal of impediments to future delivery Pulled By Architects, process architects, value stream leads Description An investment in improving future Feature velocity — technology, process and people. Improvement of the software architecture, operational architecture or ways of working	Technical Debt API Addition Refactoring Infrastructure Automation Skillset Improvements Process Improvements DevOps Practices
Supporting Artifact	Delivers Must be paired with at least one other Flow Item to deliver value Pulled By Architects, customers, QA, etc Description An artifact or container that provides valuable support to the delivery of business value, but the output of value is carried by another Flow Item	Requirement Documentation Task Build Release Test Case
*Ignore*	Artifacts you intentionally want to exclude from your Flow Metrics	Sub-Task

Once your flow items are modeled, expand each artifact type to model its underlying Flow State, or use the Smart Model to auto-map your flow states. Flow States are the generic workflow states of a Flow Item in a value stream.

Note: If your artifact states do not have a one-to-one match to the available flow states, you can apply a conditional Flow State.

To learn more about flow states, click the help icon on the Artifact Modeling screen or refer to the table below.

Flow State	Description	Examples
New	The first state an artifact enters as soon as it is opened and before it is committed to. Note: If your first state is a committed state, you don't need to assign a 'new' state. Instead, assign a 'waiting' or 'active' state.	New To Triage
Waiting	A 'holding' state indicating that the artifact is waiting and not actively being worked on.	To Do Blocked Ready Waiting for Approval
Active	An active state where work is actually being done on the artifact.	In Design SWAG In Dev In Progress In QA
Done	The final state an artifact moves to, representing that it is complete and has delivered some or all of its intended value.	Done Complete Resolved
Canceled	This state represents work that has been voided, deferred, or invalidated.	Canceled Deferred Descoped Rejected
Ignore	An artifact state you intentionally want to exclude from your Flow Metrics.

After you've finished modeling your flow items and flow states, click Save.

Congrats, you've modeled your value stream!

Now, you can visualize your workflow with the Flow Modeler, or head straight to your Flow Metrics dashboard to begin evaluating your metrics.

Artifact Modeling Assistant

The Artifact Modeling Assistant is a built-in tool designed to simplify and streamline the modeling process.

With the Artifact Modeling Assistant, you can:

Import Artifact and Flow Modeling from one product to another to quickly and efficiently scale your products
Use the Flow State Smart Modeler to auto-map your artifact states to the correct flow states — making modeling less time-consuming and more intuitive

Learn more in the sections below.

Importing Artifact Modeling

To import artifact modeling from another product value stream, click the Artifact Modeling Assistant dropdown and select Import Artifact Modeling.

The Import Artifact Modeling pop-up will appear where you can select the source product from which you’d like to copy the modeling.

Once you’ve selected the source product, you can quickly review your modeling by clicking the Review Modeling button.

After clicking this button, a new tab will be opened where you can view the artifact modeling for the selected source product and confirm your mappings.

Once you’ve selected the source product, you’ll need to check the compatibility between the source and target products by using the compatibility checker.

The compatibility checker will review the source and target products and let you know which mappings are not compatible for import. To be compatible for import, the following conditions must be met:

The repositories in the source and target products must be an exact match
The source product must only have 1 project within each repository
The artifact types must exist in both the source and target products
The artifact states must exist in both the source and target products
Any fields used in conditional modeling must exist in both the source and target project

Learn more about artifact modeling compatibility here.

To check compatibility, click the Check Compatibility button.

Note: If processing is in progress for the source or target product, you must wait until after processing is complete to import artifact modeling.

After clicking this button, the results of the compatibility check will appear.

Note: Unmatched artifact types/states will be set to not set.

To continue with the import, click Proceed.

A Confirm Overwrite pop-up will appear with a warning message about overwriting existing modeling.

After reviewing the message, click Overwrite.

A success message will appear notifying you that the artifact modeling was copied successfully.

After successfully importing your modeling, you can either continue to edit the artifact modeling by clicking Return to Artifact Modeling or reprocess your product and apply the modeling changes by clicking Trigger reprocessing.

Note: Reprocessing will be suspended until the resume processing button has been clicked.

Using the Flow State Smart Modeler

Using Viz's built-in expertise, the Flow State Smart Modeler (formerly named Smart Model) pulls in all of the artifact states from the artifacts in your product and auto-maps them to the available flow states (new, waiting, active, done, canceled) — making the modeling process simple and efficient.

To apply the smart modeler to your artifact states, click the Artifact Modeling Assistant dropdown and select Use Flow State Smart Modeler.

Note: If you'd like to exclude a state from being modeled, select Ignore from the Flow State dropdown. If a Flow State is set to Ignore while work is in progress on a modeled Flow Item, when work enters that state it will not be shown as WIP in Flow Load® or part of the neglected WIP calculations. In general, you should not set a Flow State to Ignore if work is in progress.

On this screen, you'll see the smart model's proposal, along with the artifact states that couldn't be auto-mapped using the smart model.

Note: If processing is in progress, you must wait until after processing is complete to use the Flow State Smart Modeler.

If something doesn’t look right, click the x icon next to the miscategorized state to remove it from your model or drag-and-drop it to the correct Flow State.

You can also move unmapped artifact states to the correct Flow State using the drag-and-drop function.

If you'd like to remove all of your mapped artifact states from a particular Flow State, you can use the eraser icon.

After clicking this icon, your mapped artifact states will be moved to the unmapped section.

To map multiple artifact states to a particular Flow State, you can use the bulk editor.

To do this, enter the artifact states in the filter and use the dropdown to select the Flow State where you’d like to map the artifact states.

If you've already modeled some of your artifact states, you can click Overwrite existing Flow State mappings to overwrite previous mappings.

Note: By default, the smart model will not overwrite your mappings, and will default to the Append the existing artifact modeling option.

Once you're satisfied with the model, click Proceed.

A confirmation message will then appear.

If you missed something and would like to update your mappings, click Back.

If you don’t need to make any changes to the mappings, go ahead and click Proceed and the mappings will be applied.

A success message will appear notifying you that the mappings were applied successfully.

After successfully updating your mappings, you can either continue to edit the artifact modeling by clicking Return to Artifact Modeling or reprocess your product and apply the modeling changes by clicking Trigger reprocessing.

Note: Reprocessing will be suspended until the resume processing button has been clicked.

Conditional Flow Items

To generate Flow Metrics, Planview Viz® affords users the ability to model their artifacts into flow items and those artifacts' statuses into flow states.

But sometimes the artifact type in your external tool doesn’t have a one-to-one match with the four flow items (Feature, Defect, Debt, Risk).

For example, in a tool like Trello where every artifact is a card, organizations may use a type field or a tag to denote whether a card is a feature, defect, debt, risk, or supporting artifact.

Artifact	Tag	Flow Item
Card	Story	Feature
	Bug	Defect
	Debt	Debt
	Security	Risk

Or, you may want to whittle down the set of artifacts used to generate Flow Metrics, for example to those belonging to one specific team or component. In those cases, you can apply a condition to your Flow Item mappings. Viz will treat any artifacts that don't meet the conditions configured as Not Set (i.e., not included in Flow Metrics).

Artifact	Team	Flow Item
Story	Compliance	Feature
Bug	Compliance	Defect
Debt	Compliance	Debt
Security Risk	Compliance	Risk

Note: If a Flow State is set to Ignore while work is in progress on a modeled Flow Item, when work enters this state it will not be shown as WIP in Flow Load or part of the neglected WIP calculations. In general, you should not set a Flow State to Ignore if work is in progress.

Viz supports configuring rule-based modeling using the following field types:

Single Select
Multi Select
Boolean
Text (Summary & Formatted ID only)
Container (Jira Align Program field only)

Note: To ensure you can use the Starts With operator and type in free text when setting a condition, Viz matches fields by label, and not by ID. As a result, if a program or single select value is renamed, you must contact support to reload options so you can set an additional condition with the new name.

Configuring Conditional Flow Items

To configure rule-based modeling (also referred to as conditional Flow Item mapping), go to the Artifact Modeling tab for your product value stream.

Click the + icon in the Condition column for the artifact type you’d like to configure.

In the Add Condition (Flow Item) panel, populate the condition you'd like to apply. You can click + Add Statement to add additional criteria to the condition.

Note: Viz matches field values for Flow Item conditions based on label, so if the value's label changes in the tool (i.e., if it changes in Jira), the condition must be reconfigured in Viz to ensure metrics continue to be accurate.

Once applied, model that row into the correct Flow Item.

If you'd like to view all conditions, select Expand from the dropdown next to your condition. If you'd like to apply additional conditions to the same artifact type, select Add or Duplicate from the dropdown.

Add: Creates a new row with no condition configured.
Duplicate: Creates a new row with the same condition configured, so that you can easily modify field values based on the original statement. 'Duplicate' will also copy over any associated Flow State or Flow Item mappings so that they do not need to be re-mapped (if the original condition has already been saved).

Once all of your conditions have been set, mapped, and their associated flow states modeled, click Save.

Note: Setting a condition can take some time to process. We recommend setting all desired conditions before saving.

As your updated Flow Item mappings process, you can track progress using the bar at the top of the screen.

Editing or Removing a Conditional Flow Item

To edit or remove a condition that you’ve set, click on the condition's link.

Click the trash can icon to remove a condition.

Once you’ve removed or edited your conditions as desired, click Apply.

Confirm your flow mappings look as expected, and click Save.

Note: Updating or removing a condition can take some time to process. We recommend updating all desired conditions before saving.

Conditional Flow States

To generate Flow Metrics, Planview Viz® affords users the ability to model their artifacts into flow items and those artifacts' statuses into flow states.

But sometimes the status in your external tool doesn’t have a one-to-one match with the five flow states (New, Active, Waiting, Done, Canceled).

For example, an in progress state could either be active or waiting depending on whether a blocked tag has been applied.

Status	Tags	Flow State
In Progress	Blocked	Waiting
In Progress	Not Blocked	In Progress

Or a done state could be either done or new, depending on whether the Resolution field is done or deferred.

Status	Resolution	Flow State
Done	Done	Done
Done	Deferred	New

In these cases, rule-based modeling can be applied to create more fine-tuned Flow State mappings.

Viz supports configuring rule-based modeling using the following field types:

Single Select
Multi Select
Boolean
Text (Summary & Formatted ID only)
Container (Jira Align Program field only)

Note: To ensure you can use the Starts With operator and type in free text when setting a condition, Viz matches fields by label, and not by ID. As a result, if a Program or single select value is renamed, you must contact support to reload options so you can set an additional condition with the new name.

Configuring Conditional Flow States

To configure rule-based modeling (also referred to as conditional Flow State mapping), go to the Artifact Modeling tab for your product value stream.

Click the + icon next to the desired artifact type to view its statuses. Click the + icon in the Condition column for the artifact status you’d like to configure.

In the Add Condition (Flow State) panel, select the set of conditions you’d like to map. You can click + Add Statement to add additional criteria to the condition. Each condition will appear in the Artifact Modeling tab, which can then be categorized as a separate Flow State.

Note: To ensure that the conditional filters are mutually exclusive, the same field must be used for each condition.

After applying your condition(s), it will appear in the Artifact Modeling tab. You can then model your condition(s) into the correct Flow State.

Note: Setting a condition can take some time to process. We recommend setting all desired conditions before saving.

Add: Creates a new row with no condition configured.
Duplicate: Creates a new row with the same condition configured, so that you can easily modify field values based on the original statement. Duplicate will also copy over any associated Flow State mappings so that they do not need to be re-mapped (if the original condition has already been saved).

Once all of your conditions have been set, mapped, and their associated flow states modeled, click Save.

As your updated Flow State mappings process, you can track progress using the bar at the top of the screen.

Editing or Removing a Conditional State

To edit or remove a condition that you’ve set, click on the condition's link.

Click the trash can icon to remove the entire condition, or click the x to remove a single condition.

Once you’ve removed or edited your conditions as desired, click Apply.

Confirm your Flow mappings look as expected, and click Save.

Note: Updating or removing a condition can take some time to process. We recommend updating all desired conditions before saving.

Next Steps

Now that you've modeled your artifacts, you can visualize your workflow with the Flow Modeler.