Process mapping day help to reduce cycle time

It has always been my ambition to transform the company's IT department from a sad server maintenance team into a team that transforms the company's business. This transformation led us to a new opportunity. We held a special event — the day of business processes. Over time, this became a regular scheduling “process mapping day”. Of course, at first it was born in IT, in the product team, and then spread to the entire company.

How we did it. I gathered a group of people from different departments, but engaged in a certain set of tasks necessary for processing complex business transactions. During the first half of the day we drew the Process flow diagrams. We mostly drew on flip-charts. But I liked it more when we drew on the walls with special markers. You can draw a big diagram on a big wall!

Typically, the scheme contained about 30-40 objects: a product path and a network of information signals. And besides, we added numerical performance measurements to the process diagram (numbers, waiting time, cycle time, signals, transition conditions, etc.). For example, my practice shows that in a company (fully digital) of 300-500 people, there will be at least 30-50 such schemes (processes). In companies with offline business (from 2000-3000 people) there will be 150-300 such processes. A day of business processes can turn into 4-6-10 separate “days” of meetings (according to the number of process clusters).

After dinner, we began to discuss the schemes. That was great. For the sake of this, such a day was started. During the discussion, it usually sounded like this: according to the “regulations”, action A must be done after B, but in practice this is not so .... Or this: why do we do A after B ? Would it more efficient to do them in parallel? Or - How is that decision made? We do need more information!

It was a day of insights.  

Usually, if you do this procedure once a quarter, then everything in your company will begin to change quite noticeably for the better. The very fact that you have drawn (and realized) the process collectively greatly simplifies and speeds it up. I observed a noticeable reduction in cycle time in the first weeks after the first “process mapping day” (at least 20%-25% - that is, the cycle was reduced by 1/5, by 1/4 - it was just magic). It happened simply because collective awareness was being born. And yet - we found unnecessary processes. Yes it was. The atmosphere in the company has changed. Some “very necessary” (you know, expensive) automation projects became unnecessary or we got by with “little automation”. If interested, I can give advice: how to prepare such meetings in advance, how to facilitate the meeting and what post-activities should be carried out to have an effect.

I'll let you in on a little secret. It is harmful to use BPMN for drawing diagrams. (As soon as someone starts being clever and insisting on BPMN - that this is supposedly a standard - drive him away :)). I'm kidding. A simple notation is enough for a collective discussion.

For team meetings on process mapping day, I used the notation that is used at Harvard Business School as a standard for describing business processes. This notation is easy to remember. There are only three types of objects here: a rectangle is an operation, a pyramid is a waiting area (or buffer), and a diamond is a decision point. And two types of arrows: a solid one is a product flow, a dotted line is an information flow. But any additional information is written arbitrarily: there are no restrictions here. Write everything - how much time you spend on the operation, that you are waiting for a letter from John before doing task B. And so on.