How to Capture Business Processes
Last week I wrote about what businesses need in order to grow without the growing pains. In those posts, I talked about the benefits of using processes to avoid unnecessary overhead (reinventing the wheel) and to accommodate growth.
Business processes can be harder to capture for some industries than for others. There's an entire science dedicated to developing solid business processes for the IT and software sectors, so my advice can't possibly do justice to every single business need imaginable—I can certainly try though.
This may seem like recursive logic, but there's actually a process to capturing a process:
- Ask the veteran employees, the people who've been performing the business routine in question, what the first step of the process is.
- With that answer in hand, ask them about the next step.
- With each new step, determine if there are any "branches" in the process and follow those branches out into their entirety (we call these "decisions" in the language of flowcharting).
- Repeat this process until you have recorded all of the steps of the business process in question.
- Document the business process in an electronic document (typically, a flowchart is used).
- Store the document into your organization's knowledge repository.
- Refer to the document whenever someone needs to learn the business process in question.
Let's go ahead and review an example of how to achieve this.
Example: Expanding the Shipping Department
You manage the shipping department for a company that warehouses and distributes consumer electronics to local retailers. The holiday season is coming up soon and your company is going to start moving more inventories at a faster pace. Your boss asks you to add some new employees to the shipping department to take on the increased workload. However, you don't have any training materials prepared—what do you do?
In the scenario that I've described, your boss is really asking you to capture all of the processes required to do the work of your shipping department. So how do you do it? The simple answer is that capturing business processes consists of asking your veteran employees some pointed questions about their work routines and recording the answers. Let's explore that first before we step into some of the nuances.
Asking the Right Questions
The first thing you'd want to do in this scenario is approach your veterans, your existing employees, and simply ask some questions. Here's how it might play out:
Manager (You): When you need to fill an order, what's the first thing that you do?
Shipping Clerk: First, I get the highest priority order number out of the queue via our terminal, and then I double-check to make sure that the order is not a duplicate.
Therefore, the first step of your process is getting the order out of the terminal. The second step is checking to see if it's a duplicate.
Manager (You): What do you do if an order is a duplicate?
Shipping Clerk: I check to see if one of the duplicates has already been filled, and...
You can see where I'm going with this. You probably already know the answers to your own questions, but you need to hear how he does it. Even if you trained him a few years back, it may turn out that things have changed or that the employee himself has found more efficient ways of doing his job—ways that you were not aware of. It's important to document your employee's answers in order to compile them into a universal process.
Documenting the Answers
A flowchart is the best way to go for mapping a process—it's a natural method for mapping a process and it's easy to draw. Here's what a flowchart for the start of this process would look like (obviously, this is not the entire flowchart):
If you want a full explanation for how to draw process maps (flowcharts), read our PDF, "Working Smarter with Process Maps."
If it were I in this scenario, I'd stand there with a clipboard, a pad and a pen and draw a flowchart by hand, as the shipping clerk gave me his answers to my questions regarding his order-filling routine. Needless to say, my hand-drawn flowchart would probably be insufficient to use as training material—I'd redo it in a drawing program and commit it to our company's knowledge repository.
Really? It’s that simple?
Not always. Capturing, refining and mapping a shipping process are straightforward compared to developing a process for executing software development projects. However, the approach that I took in this article can be applied broadly across your organization. It might be more difficult to execute in some areas than others might, but generally speaking, it works.
Over the rest of August, I'm going to write a lot more information regarding how you can reap the benefits of processes in your own organization, so you might want to consider subscribing to Working Smarter.
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