Teams Create Poor Quality Process Maps. The Solution? Don’t Teach Mapping!

It had to be a joke; I was convinced of it. They were pulling one over on the company’s new Quality Director. I was sitting in on one of my Black Belt’s Lean classes. He got to the section on Process Mapping. The following two slides came on screen and he talked to them for about 3 minutes. Then he moved on to a new topic.

The Slides…

At a break, I went up to the instructor, “When’s the rest of the training on Process Mapping?”

“That’s it,” He told me, “Those slides are all that corporate has in the training.”

“Wait,” I replied dumbfounded, “You’re not joking? That’s really all there is?”

“Come over here,” the instructor told me with a conspiratorial tone. When we got over to a corner he began to explain.

“We used to teach process mapping. In fact, every project had to have a map included in their work.”

“That makes sense,” I interjected, “maps are the best way to define value, see the stream, improve flow, identify wastes…all the things folks are supposed to do in Lean.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, “but there were some standardization problems. You see, not everyone has Visio, so some were using symbols on PowerPoint. Some were even drawing them out by hand and scanning them. The maps were not looking the same.”

“So, the maps looked a bit different…big deal” I replied.

“It wasn’t just that. Some teams were mapping at a high level; like flying at 50,000 feet. Others were mapping every little detail, like flying at 100 feet. Some teams didn’t have clear start and stop points. Others would have convoluted decision diamonds. All the differences were driving the guys at corporate crazy.”

I stood there, not quite believing what I was hearing. He continued…

“When they revised the training about 2 years ago, they replaced the process mapping section with these two slides. It’s been that way since.”

“But they can’t….I mean…how do they…” I was stammering, trying to gather my thoughts. All I could think of was, How do you teach lean without process mapping? Every Lean Training program I’ve seen in over 20 years has taught process mapping!

After the class, I did some digging, and this is what I found:

• Years ago, when the Operational Excellence program was starting up, Process Mapping was taught, and used, extensively.
• The corporate OpEx department wanted to showcase everyone’s work. So they developed a project tracking process that had divisions send reports of events. The reports had to include Process Maps.
• Corporate did not take any actions with the maps. They did not use them in an approval process. They did not do any analysis of them. They just put them in PowerPoints to provide dog and pony shows to Senior Leaders.
• The corporate OpEx team became annoyed at all the different formats and levels of details.?They felt it looked sloppy in the presentations. So they began mandating standards: size of symbols, colors to be used, specific fonts, etc.
• The standards were not being used. Not sure if it was a communications issue, training, poor rollout, or indifference of teams.
• When the Corporate OpEx team revised the training program, they decided to address their problem by dropping process mapping as a teachable skill.

Overreacting to a non-problem is how it got to the point of having a gutted training program. As expected, it had impacts. Teams were insufficiently trained, which led to poor projects. Poor projects led to rotten results. Rotten results led to reduced respect for OpEx. Within three years of the training change, the OpEx function was eliminated: folded into Engineering Department.

My first exposure to this field was the words of Dr. Deming, and I agree with his philosophy: that everyone wants to do good work. Deming pointed out management often creates barriers that rob people of their pride of workmanship. I’ve seen plenty of such obstacles. But this...this was the Great Wall of Stupidity.

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