Working with Fact Sheets

In this section we will walk you through the structure of a single Fact Sheet, show you how to add and edit information in an efficient way, and give you instructions and best practices on how to set-up Fact Sheets.

Fact Sheet Definition & Structure

Fact Sheets are the central element in LeanIX. They document and save information on architectural objects like applications, business capabilities, or IT components. With a Fact Sheet, you keep all relevant information on a "one-pager" and maintain the dependencies within your IT landscape.

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Information

Fact Sheet structure are configured by the admin in the Meta Model Configuration.

Create a Fact Sheet

Either in the Inventory menu or on a selected Fact Sheet, press the "New Fact Sheet" button on top of the right-hand panel.

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Select the Fact Sheet type you want to create, and choose a name (e.g. Type: Business Capability; Name: Customer Management). Clicking Create leads you to your brand new Fact Sheet.

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Best Practice:

For creating and updating Fact Sheets of the type IT Component we recommend using our Lifecycle Catalog. While entering the IT Components' name, Lifecycle Catalog will automatically search its library and give drop-down suggestions to choose from. It additionally adds information like version, description, and (Vendor) Lifecycle of an IT Component, if available. You will improve your data quality significantly while gaining speed in entering data.

Fact Sheet Naming Rules

Name

  • Does not need to be unique per Fact Sheet type
  • Used as one component for the full name
  • Type: string

Full name

  • Calculated by LeanIX according to the Fact Sheet type’s naming rules, which are different per Fact Sheet type
  • BC: [name]
  • Process: [name]
  • User group: [name]
  • Project: [name]
  • Data object: [name]
  • Provider: [name]
  • Tech Category: [name]
  • Application: [name] [Release]
  • Interface: [Name] [Release]
  • IT Component: [Provider] [Name] [Release]
  • Type: string

Display name

  • Unique per Fact Sheet type
  • Needed to reference Fact Sheets when importing relations
  • Calculated by LeanIX according to the Fact Sheet type’s naming rule: [Parent 1] / [Parent n] / [Full Name]
  • Type: string

Adding and Editing Data in a Fact Sheet

If you want to edit data on a Fact Sheet, simply hover over the section you want to update and press the Edit button that appears in the upper right corner.

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This will open an input screen that lets you edit all information that is vital to a certain section. If you are just working through a new Fact Sheet, you can chose Save & Next. LeanIX will automatically lead you to edit the next section (in this example "Lifecycle").

If you want to Add new information, you will be asked to search for a Fact Sheet you want to relate and add a description of the relation. You can also add the timespan for which the relationship will be active.

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As soon as you type in a project name, you will receive a list of already existing projects that could match your search. You can choose one of the suggested projects and save it to apply your choice.

If you do not find the project you are looking for, or if you intend to relate a project that does not already exist, LeanIX suggests you create a new Project Fact Sheet on-the-fly. To create it, click on the New button that appears on the right-hand side. You need to make sure that "on-the-fly creation" is enabled for the Project Fact Sheets.

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Best Practices

LeanIX offers you several features to optimize your workflow while maintaining data in the workspace. As the Save & Next feature introduced above, there is the possibility to click Save & New while adding Fact Sheet relations. Using Save & New will keep you on the input screen to relate one more IT Component.

Another Best Practice to add more than one relation at once is our Add multiple feature that is explained in the upcoming section**.

Add Multiple

If you need to add a certain amount of Fact Sheet relations, LeanIX gives you the chance to Add multiple Fact Sheets at once. This might be useful if you want to add a group of Fact Sheets that match certain filter criteria.

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Clicking on Add multiple will lead you to a filter similar to the one in the inventory, including smart search functionality.

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Best Practice:

Besides the features we have just seen here, a key to a purposeful management of your Fact Sheet is adding Tags and keeping track of the Completion level and Data quality. For further information on this inevitable topic have a closer look at Use Tags for more powerful insights and Increase your Data Quality.

Constraining Relations / Business Capabilities "relation valid for"

It is possible to relate Business Capabilities to Organization in Application Fact Sheets (the relation is always 1 to 1). When no relation is specifically added to a Business Capability, the system automatically assigns it to all Organizations without constraints. This means the application is considered to support that Business Capability throughout the entire Organization. However, when you create constraining relations, you introduce more granularity and specificity to this relationship.

You can define constraining relationships by clicking on Open Overview in the Business Capabilities section of the Fact Sheet. You can create, remove, and also open in Matrix Report from the resulting window.

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Best Practice:

When in doubt, start without relation constraints and add them later. They might add granularity but they also add maintenance effort for your users.

Leave Empty

The relation can be left blank intentionally by selecting "Leave Empty". This implies that the data is not missing by mistake, but perhaps the application doesn't have a Successor/Predecessor or it doesn't depend on any IT Components (Manual process), and therefore is has none to be related to.

"Leave Empty" will treat the relation as filled out for the completion score and you can filter by it.

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Adding and Deleting Business Capabilities from Organizations

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Organizations without Children: Allows a view to add or delete any Fact Sheets to the Organization by drilling down to the specific Business Capability required.

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Organizations with Children: Allows a view to edit Business Capabilities of specific Users within a User Group. Make sure to assign Fact Sheets to each Organization individually to allow easy deletion in the future.

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Warning:

If you initially assign Business Capabilities to an entire Organization with children, you will not be able to delete the Business Capabilities individually from the children of the Organization.

Review Fact Sheet Subscriptions

As soon as you switch to the column Subscription you can see who is currently subscribed to a Fact Sheet, and have the following options to manage those subscriptions.

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Add a person: Leads you to a screen that will allow you to add new subscribers to the Fact Sheet, no matter if they are already using LeanIX or not.

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Subscribers Information: Gives you information about name, subscription type (e.g. Responsible) and Subscription Role (e.g. Enterprise Architect). It also offers a button that enables you to directly contact this person via mail.

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Edit Subscription: Leads you to a screen to update users' subscription information (e.g. change subscription role).

If you want to add a new subscriber, you can do so by email address or name. While typing the name, LeanIX suggest matching users that are already subscribed to the workspace. Next you have to select their type and the role, if already defined.

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Best Practice

Working with a well-structured role model enhances the way you can cooperate in your workspace. A good set of subscription roles should match your organizational governance model and include proper role descriptions. We recommend to define such a model in the admin area and set roles for every subscriber. To find out how this is done, please have a look at our chapter Define Subscription Roles.

Adding Contacts

If you want to add a contact that is not an active user of your workspace, select New person.

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A new Contact will be now added to the subscription. This person will not receive any notifications by LeanIX. Nevertheless, you will now have stored the person's name and email address. The Invite button enables you to invite this person to LeanIX if you like.

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Comment on Fact Sheets

Commenting on Fact Sheets can be used to gather specific information and remind to submit information into the Fact Sheet. Comments are forwarded to every subscriber if the notification is activated.

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New comment: For every Fact Sheet you are able to add new comments, that are displayed on top of the list.

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Answer comments: For every comment a thread will be opened. Every workspace user can contribute, until somebody closes the thread actively. To do so, you need to check **Close topic** and submit your answer.

Store Resources on Fact Sheets

LeanIX allows you to store three different types of resources directly on the Fact Sheet as an additional source of information. You are able to link external resources to a Fact Sheet, upload files to a Fact Sheet directly and link the Fact Sheet to an existing diagram in LeanIX.

To do so, simply navigate to the tab Resources on the Fact Sheet detail page and click on the Add new resource. From here, you are able to choose all three above options.

Link External Resource

To add an External Resource, you can provide the following data:

  • Resource name
  • Resource URL (http: or https: are required to be there)
  • Type
  • Description
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Link Internal Diagrams

To link a Diagram, you are able to select an entry from the drop-down list. Once a Diagram has been selected, you are able to click Save.

Linked Diagrams are visible both in the Resources tab, as well as the Fact Sheet sidebar.

Upload files on a Fact Sheet

You can upload static files of a size up to 10MB on the Fact Sheet Resources tab. These files will be listed in the “Files” section. Clicking on an image file will display the image in a dialog, while other files of other types will be downloaded when clicked.

Data uploaded in the Resources are stored in Azure Storage and by default, Azure encrypts storage account data at rest.

Disable/enable uploading files on Fact Sheets

Admins can disable or enable the functionality to upload and download files on a Fact Sheet in the “Optional Features” admin page.

Disabling the feature will not delete previously uploaded files, so they will still be available when it is activated again.

Create Surveys

A powerful feature to gather focused information in your workspace is by using Surveys. This feature is designed to reach out to the subscribers of a Fact Sheet and make them maintain data or get additional qualitative feedback about a Fact Sheet (e.g. Application).

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Best Practice:

Working with surveys is an easy but powerful way to increase cooperation within your workspace. To get into survey design in more depth get in touch with your Customer Success Manager.

Additionally with the Completion Score, you can instantly assess which Fact Sheets are missing relevant information. Have a look at the section Increase your Data Quality to understand in detail how does the completion score works and how can you benefit from it.

Review a Fact Sheets Change History

You are able to see the complete changelog of each Fact Sheet and view what changes were done.

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Event: Shows you what action has been applied to the Fact Sheet.

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Path: Shows you what field has been updated.

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Old Value / New Value: Shows you the old and the new value that has been entered. Old Value will be empty, if it has been initially populated.

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User / Time: Shows you the user that changed the value and a timestamp for the change.

The entries cannot be deleted manually, however, in the context of the EU GDPR regulation, personal data will be deleted accordingly.

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Information:

For users of the LeanIX EAM Product Version, there is a "Get Legacy Events" button on the bottom of the list. This enables you to get all events that occurred before your migration to the LeanIX Pathfinder.