Making Process Maps Work For You

What Is A Process Map?
Remember Grandma’s great chocolate chip cookies, and how everyone wanted the recipe?

Very simply, a “Process Map” is simply a recipe, a way to make sure the outcome, be it cookie, or process, turns out the same every time. I was first introduced to Process Maps about 5 years ago, when searching for a way to scale my business, and make certain that each and every employee understood, and always acted in a way which honored our customers, and our business interests.

One of the great challenges any business, from the Mom and Pop corner store, to the largest manufacturing facility, faces, is to make both service and product consistent, ideally consistently excellent. The traditional way, employed for hundreds of years, is to train or apprentice each employee so they know and understand the company culture. Problem arises when an employee departs, he or she takes that knowledge with them, or any employee is absent, and no one else knows how to do that particular operation, or when someone invents a better way of doing things, but it never gets shared with the rest of the team.

A Process Map is simply a dynamic knowledgebase that captures the collective knowledge, best practices and knowhow that each every post (job) possesses. And it is important to document each post, from the fellow cleaning the offices to the CFO entering the financials, for this allows the collective knowledge to be recorded, analyzed, and improved upon. This is yet another dimension to Process Maps, that is having each and every post follow the standard practice, assuring a consistent result.

In larger firms that adhere to the ISO system of standards, Process Maps are the rule, but in smaller firms, this is not the case. All too often the knowledgebase is concentric around the owner, and the employees are not empowered to make decisions, or have all the knowledge they need to do their jobs well. While this makes the owner feel important, it creates hurdles to growth and development, meaning that the owner is often tied to his or her desk, and in their absence, communication, efficiency and quality often break down.

So let’s revisit Grandma’s recipe, and think about how we can apply that to modern business. Do we not need to collect the same information, time, who, when, what, where in baking as we do in business? Sure, those very same assets need to be located, accounted for, and used in the right order, at the right time. So this in essence is what a Process Map captures. First, we need a “Purpose” why are we doing this; employees need to know the “why” just as much as the “how”. Next we need to layout what “Assets” are required, telephone, flour, sugar, so the baker, or employee, has all that they need on hand. Finally we need a “How”, how much sugar, how long to bake, whom to call, when to call, what to say. And that, those three key items form a Process Map.

Making Process Maps Work For You
It’s important to point out that a Process Map is going to be unique for each business, while the overall template may be similar, one cannot simply copy another business’s Process Map, and expect the same results. So there is an investment, both in time and energy, to correctly craft a functional Process Map.

I should also add a final detail here, the map needs to be crafted in a way that any employee, regardless of their post, can pick up the process map of another employee who might be out on leave or vacation, and flow the steps exactly. This is highly critical; write the map in a way that no doubt is left. Script words, tell how to use the phone or computer, in essence, everything the employee will need to automatously work in that post.

The Magic Of Google Drive
Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service provided by Google, released on April 24, 2012, which enables user cloud storage, file sharing and collaborative editing. Google Drive is the home of Google Docs, an office suite of productivity applications that offer collaborative editing on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.

Google Drive is a cloud storage service…Essentially; it's a beefed-up version of Google Docs. You can store your documents, photos, music, videos, and etc. all in one place. It syncs with your mobile devices and your computer, so if you make a change from one gadget, it will automatically show up if you were to access it elsewhere.

It tracks your changes too, so if you make an edit to the document and hit save, you can still look back at all your revisions from the past 30 days. Of course it relies heavily on Google search, with image recognition for browsing your photos and some OCR capabilities for sniffing out text in pictures.

You'll be able to open things you saved in Google Drive using other service; it can handle more than 30 different types of files, including Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and HD video, and you don't even have to have those programs installed on your computer. So for example, if you squirreled away a music file, you could listen to it later on whatever player you please. Drive also pretty much does away with email attachments, which makes sharing a lot easier. If you wanted to show a friend a video of your vacation, you could just pass them a link to that file, rather than adding it to a clunky message. You wouldn't have to upload it to a message and your friend wouldn't have to wait around to download a big file.

No matter what happens to your devices, your files are safely stored in Google Drive. And everything you upload to or create in Drive belongs to you and is automatically set to private, unless you decide to share.

And sharing is where Google Drive really shines when it comes to Process Maps. With the sharing feature, you can choose who has access to a document, if they just view, or if they can edit it, which makes it perfect for the Process Map model. You can keep one version of each Process Map on the drive, set up individual folders with different rights for different users, and have a complete, off site, backed, operations manual…which, and here is the cool thing, can be accesses from anywhere, and where the content can be dynamically changed, without reprinting an entire manual!