Transformation | Process Mapping
How does it all hang together?
Measure what you do before you change things around
What is Process Modelling?
Process Modelling is part of an approach to structuring businesses that has been heavily influenced by Total Quality Management and Lean methodologies.
Essentially, Process Modelling is capturing the steps that your business takes in order to deliver some product or service. The steps are captured visually in diagrams using the BPMN 2.0 modelling standard as opposed to text because paragraphs of text can be interpreted differently by people whereas diagrams are more objective.
Also diagrams are more engaging for teams to view and agree (or disagree) on.
A baseline model of how things operate today is called the ‘AS-IS’ model for a particular process.
How can it help me?
We’ve been offering process modelling services for small medium sized businesses for a fair while. Process models can help people understand where bottlenecks are happening, which hand-overs are problematic and identifying waste. With additional data you can find:
- Cycle-time/cost – How much time/money to it take to deliver one instance of the process
- Resourcing levels – how many people are required to deliver the process under different time/volume constraints
- Pain-points – if you were to automate aspects of the process where would you get the most bang for your buck
- Alignment – How well does this version of the process deliver the capability to reach your company mission
How is it done?
A piece of work like this involves a number of elements in order to determine what the current state of play is, principally:
- Scope definition: Essentially a chat with you to understand what is the process being analysed. What does this include and what isn’t being included.
- Reviewing existing documentation: This can be any existing documentation around the process from policy documents to Local Working Procedures(LWPs) / Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to understand what should be happening in the process.
- Interviews/Workshop: Speaking to the front-line staff who implement the process. Whether this is best done by interviews or workshop depends on the numbers involved, availability and number of different teams involved.
- Preparation and presentation of the results: Feedback of the results with any relevant metrics.
What can I do with the results?
Simply getting people in a room talking can highlight some easy changes to make to improve efficiency or eliminate waste.
- Starting point for discussing improvements – From questioning how the process supports the companies objectives and vision to seeing exactly how the service is delivered to the customer. The process is no longer an understanding in the heads of the people involved, it’s externalised, it’s down on paper for everyone to look at and comment.
- Increased ownership – If staff understand clearly why they’re doing something, then ownership of the process increases. A process that is actively owned doesn’t stay as a file gathering dust on a network drive, staff themselves will want to make improvements and keep the documentation of their process up to date.
- Standardised behaviour – each person involved in a process understands the whole process and what their role in that process is. This leads to consistent journeys for customers who come into contact with the process.
- Training new Staff – As a support tool in on-boarding or actively used for reference by the teams involved.
- Supporting job descriptions For HR teams to understand how much time certain activities make up a role.
Process models allow you to go further, by having a measured baseline you can:
- Plan changes to your process to become better aligned with some strategic vision.
- Understand what would be required to pivot to deliver a new service.
- Understand how much some new software will improve productivity.
Find out how process maps can be the start to making your business more agile to changes in the market place.
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