Reinventing Process Mapping

Back in the 1990s, I recall crafting turtle diagrams to delineate processes, alongside the abundant collection of standard operating procedures available at Bosch. These diagrams brought into focus the Input, Output, Process, Resources (Who and What), Methods, and Metrics. Over the past 25 years, process management has continued to evolve. Companies now delineate key processes, from Level 0 to subsequent levels, utilizing Swim-Lane Diagrams and even implementing interactive web-based process landscapes. I'm certain many of you have undertaken similar endeavors, primarily directed at the indirect areas within a company.

On the flip side, the gold standard for the direct areas of a company has been the process flow chart or value stream map combined with the control plan. Here, the emphasis is consistently high, stressing process capability, first-time accuracy, zero defects, work-in-progress, and notably, productivity. This sharp focus has enabled companies to persistently enhance and innovate their direct value streams, ensuring competitiveness and success in the market. However, in many cases, process descriptions have remained largely unchanged over the years. Whenever I visit a company, I often check the revision history of process documentation, finding that revisions are infrequent, sometimes spanning several years.

In this article, I aim to share insights on revitalizing and embodying process management, enabling all areas, including the indirect ones, to continually enhance and innovate, thereby remaining competitive in the market. The first crucial step involves defining all organizational roles, aligning them with the organization chart. In today's tech-driven world, linking all roles to company processes allows for clear understanding of role expectations simply by filtering role occupants. I vividly recall the challenges, especially in my senior leadership roles, in grasping the organization's expectations, sometimes taking months to fully comprehend them.

Next, describing process steps, preferably through Swim Lane diagrams, is essential. This entails identifying the percentage and frequency of queries at each step, resolving time for queries, total turn-around-time, and touch time for each step. Clearly defining the control loop—when to start and end—is paramount. Additionally, specifying the responsible role for each step, the approver role (if different), collaborating roles, supporting roles, and roles requiring information ensures clarity and accountability.

In my experience, it's ineffective to expect intelligent knowledge workers to adhere rigidly to detailed process descriptions. I also believe that a very detailed process description, with total clarity, that basically needs no consultation at all, is a huge deterrent to collaboration and teamwork, since every role occupier would just do his job in adherence with the described process, which in most cases will have to be tailored to the context and without the intrinsic need to seek help from the team and adapt, the outcomes will just be mediocre. Providing key success factors as hints for input, processing, and output allows for improvisation based on context, resulting in favorable outcomes with the use of human intelligence. Rather than exhaustively detailing every step, it's more effective to reduce process levels based on outcomes and meticulously outline key success metrics to accurately gauge, monitor, and steer performance.

I advocate for defining performance indicators along with computation standards, focusing on efficiency and effectiveness while keeping it minimal. Establishing monitoring and reporting clockspeeds is crucial; for instance, reporting revenue against monthly targets requires a monthly clockspeed, while monitoring might occur weekly for continual improvisation. Defining the communication medium for reports is essential for digitalization and automation, followed by reviewing reports and deciding on steering measures. Setting the review clockspeed is vital for consistent performance and organizational learning, which may vary based on the indicator's importance to the business.

I believe that by clearly defining roles, simplifying process levels, providing key success factor hints, and detailing success metrics, productivity in indirect areas can significantly increase.

When was the last time you simplified your process maps? How easily can your role occupants access the expectations from them in your company? How optimized are your performance indicators, and how easily can cause and effect be established?

Happy reading!