How do you use process mapping to design and implement cross-functional and cross-organizational processes?

In my experience, process mapping is more than just a diagram—it's a storytelling tool. While working with a multinational corporation to overhaul their procurement process, we used process mapping not just to delineate steps but to narrate the journey of an order, from initiation to fulfillment. This visual and narrative approach helped stakeholders from various departments understand their role in the ecosystem, leading to more efficient and coordinated actions.

A process map can take many forms. At its heart, it represents a roadmap from initiation to completion of a process. But it can be complex if a process has many tasks, sub-tasks, and actions.

One way to document roles and stakeholders is a RACI map. This shows who is Responsible-Approving-Consulted-Informed. A key finding happens with Approved. There only can be one Approver for each main process step in a well defined process.

Process mapping is also integral to driving standardised service and training staff - without processes being defined, it’s near-impossible to share best-practice consistently. Process-mapping also demystifies the activity from other teams, meaning those who are client-facing can be confident when setting expectations.

Process mapping shines in illuminating the often hidden interdependencies in cross-functional processes. I recall a project in the healthcare sector where we used process mapping to redesign patient flow. The mapping highlighted how different departments like triage, diagnostics, and treatment were interlinked. By understanding these connections, we could streamline the patient journey, significantly reducing wait times and improving patient satisfaction.

In a project aimed at integrating marketing and sales processes for a tech firm, we employed swimlane diagrams for process mapping. This allowed us to clearly delineate responsibilities and workflows between the two functions. It also helped in identifying points of collaboration and handover, leading to a more seamless operation between the teams, reflected in improved campaign-to-sales conversion rates.

A S-W-O-T Strength-Weakness-Opportunity-Threat diagram and analysis is a great tool at the beginning of the process analysis to help the team focus on the part of the process that needs work.

Process mapping can act as a bridge, fostering a unified understanding among diverse teams. For example, in a project with a logistics company, process mapping helped synchronize the operations and customer service teams. The visual representation of workflows and dependencies led to enhanced coordination, reducing delays and improving customer service metrics.

One challenge in process mapping across functions is aligning differing priorities and languages of various departments. In an enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation project, process mapping helped identify discrepancies in how different departments perceived the same process. Addressing these discrepancies was key to developing a unified, organization-wide approach to the ERP system.

Process maps provide a visually rich to perform a deep dive into a process. Understanding why, how and when each business function becomes engaged in a given workflow is critical to making process improvements. Drill down can be accomplished through Universal Process Notation (UPN) diagramming techniques that identify actors, tasks and workflow paths, coupled with an ‘RV’ matrix that identifies the specific role (the ‘R’ portion of the matrix) each actor ‘plays’ or performs (i.e. RACI) in the workflow along with the value added (the ‘V’ portion of the matrix) in that task/step by that role/person thus in turn providing critical information for value stream analysis and in making the business case for simplification of the workflow.

Process mapping is an important collaborative tool for understanding critical aspects of organizational workflow, including process and task ownership and the why and how as to how an organization accomplishes any given task it must perform. Process mapping is an integral part of fully understanding and visualizing any given business process. Process workflow mapping can reveal many opportunities for business process simplification and automation, including duplication of effort, routing and communication delays and unnecessary steps.