Understanding your business using Process Mapping

Understanding how your business operates day to day is not something many organisations do naturally. This is because we’re busy spending our time “getting on with the day job.”

As a result of this, inefficiencies can creep in, activities become fragmented, and employees can start to become frustrated with slow, poor-quality processes that fail to deliver the desired outcomes.

Process mapping allows you to:

• • see the bigger picture of how your processes work, and how they align with your company’s vision and strategy
  • understand the roles and responsibilities of each team member and stakeholder involved in a process, and how they contribute to the overall outcome
  • save money and time by identifying inefficiencies, errors, risks or gaps in your processes that need improvement
  • establish best practices and standards and ensure they are consistent, accurate and easy to follow
  • Ensuring your processes meet the relevant regulations and quality standards
  • Assess the potential risks and vulnerabilities within a process, helping organisations implement controls and safeguards to mitigate or prevent risks

Business process mapping in action:

On one assignment, I was investigating what the current business processes were for a large organisation. I interviewed several colleagues and mapped out the “as-is” process. I then presented this to senior stakeholders and got the following response:

“That is not how we do things here; they should not be following this process.”

What I learned from this example, was that what was happening on the ground was at odds with what the leadership team thought was happening. Processes were evolving as employees sought to achieve business outcomes, and inefficiencies had crept in over time. These inefficiencies led to an increase in headcount that had become unsustainable.

So, what was happening to these processes?

As more employees joined the business, processes were “broken down”, creating smaller tasks for staff. Quality was not a specific requirement, so handoffs from one part of the process to the next resulted in frustrated colleagues having to ‘fix’ errors downstream. The result was long, drawn-out processes, products and services took longer to deliver, and costs started to spiral.  This is not an uncommon scenario.

When quality outcomes at each stage start to slip…

What can be done about it?

At Protean, we use leading-edge business process mapping technology to document your processes; we interview, analyse and identify the vulnerabilities and work with employees to review those processes.

In this scenario, we bought staff together from various departments to review the “as is” processes they were involved in. We then gave them the opportunity to air their concerns and frustrations and work together to create more robust, high-quality efficient processes.

We started with a clear set of design principles or golden rules for re-developing each process:

• • We must ADD VALUE to the customer
  • Processes must be CAPABLE of delivering “right first time”
  • All processes must involve capturing information ONCE
  • Work needs to FLOW with minimal handoffs and delays
  • Defects need to be managed BEFORE passing the process to the next stage
  • Each person should be getting HIGH-QUALITY information from the previous stage
  • Staff undertaking the activity are the BEST people to drive improvement, and
  • COMPLIANCE and CLIENT REQUIREMENTS are crucial elements of the process and cannot be removed.

We introduced the team to Kaizen methodology, and working as a team; they were able to identify where the vulnerabilities were and re-engineer those processes in a positive, solution-focused way.

Employees were then given the opportunity to present their new processes to Senior Stakeholders for sign-off, and new ways of working (and friendships!) were formed.

To summarise, process mapping is a dynamic tool that supports continuous improvement efforts. It helps organisations embrace a culture of learning and adaptability by providing a framework for evaluating and updating processes over time. As business requirements evolve, process mapping enables organisations to adjust, iterate, and stay agile in response to changing circumstances.