STEP ONE: IDENTIFY THE PROCESS TO BE MAPPED
While it’s good to map out all of your processes, you have to chose a starting point. You should initially focus on the process that is most critical to your business – one where improvement can be easily tracked through numbers or data.
Generally, there are 3 ways to go about selecting a starting point for your business process mapping:
Reactive – You know where a process has failed, or have a role that is majorly underperforming. You’d want to map your processes here as a means of fixing a critical issue.
Strategic – This will be done as a high-level revamp where the chosen process will be considered integral to the strategy behind your businesses overall goals.
Customer-Focused – Processes here are chosen for mapping because they are critical to ensuring improvement in customer satisfaction. This will fix problems or inefficiencies within their process that should deliver visible growth in customer satisfaction.
STEP TWO: BRING TOGETHER THE RIGHT TEAM
Even if you thoroughly know the structure of your business, you should ensure your field employees have input in forming your new processes. Their first-hand experiences can bring value in improving the existing processes.
Change can be overwhelming. By allowing your employees in the initiatives behind mapping your processes, their voices will be heard and fear of being excluded will subside.
You should also include someone from senior management on the team to streamline the approval process of your new processes.
STEP THREE: GATHER INFORMATION
Once you have worked out your goals and the processes you are going to map, you need to start gathering information. You need to record each step, note who is in charge of what, when and how, and put as much detail as possible into creating a comprehensive process map.
At this stage, err on the side of TMI (too much information) and filter it down as you work through it.
STEP FOUR: INTERVIEW KEY FIGURES
While gathering information, you need to talk to those directly involved to figure out the level of understanding of their roles. Use their responses to identify opportunities for improvement.
Be aware that staff will bring their own opinions on structure, but it is important to listen to them and understand how the existing processes work firsthand.
STEP FIVE: BUILD YOUR BASELINE BUSINESS PROCESS MAP
Now that you have all of your data, draw up your baseline map. This map should contain all of your current operations – flaws and all. This will help you identify how the process works before any improvements have been made, and will act as a control to compare growth when your new process has been implemented.
Utilizing business process mapping professionals like Rocket Station is the most consistent, efficient and scalable way to create tangible process maps. If you would like to start your process, contact us. If you are creating your map on your own, be sure to include the following:
Process – This is the overall workflow of each step.
Tasks – Each step of the workflow, usually something that needs to be actioned by a member of staff or a system
Flows – These are the connecting lines and arrows that describe how the work flows from task to task
Events – These are the triggers or gateways that begin, redirect or end a process
Participants – As the name suggests, these are the people or systems involved in the process
STEP SIX: IDENTIFY AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT
Even though you have a thorough process map in hand, your work isn’t finished. You have to utilize your map and learn from it to make improvements along the way. Once you identify areas in your map that could be restructured, you’d want to implement the new processes on a smaller scale by focusing in one department. If these changes work better than the prior, you can roll them out to the rest of your organization.
STEP SEVEN: MONITOR IMPROVEMENTS
Whether business process mapping is done as a full-scale organizational overhaul, or just within one department, you need to properly monitor the improvement of your processes. Only through constant monitoring and optimization can you expect your processes to improve.
Now that you know how business process mapping works, it’s time to implement within your organization. If you’re looking for the right team to streamline the mapping process for you, you should schedule a free discovery call to learn how we can integrate with your business today!
