Process Mapping Tutorial

hi this is a lecture supplement to to the executive black belt course week five and it covers slides starting at one sixty nine through the end of week five and this is on on process napping I'm going to go very quickly through this largely because I believe that most people if not all who are in the executive blackboard class including the executive green book class know something about process mapping if that's not the case please do not hesitate to call to contact me at a write this up on the board at the moment here please don't hesitate to call at at or to contact me at em za ve l at straight line PS calm okay love to hear from you and if any of this is foreign to you and or confusing just just call me and we'll help straighten it out okay so again I'm going to go fairly quickly through this um but um you know we should many of us have been certainly if we're if we're into the tools of the trade if we're process people making a process math to sort of like almost the basic blocking and tackling if you will of of of process improvement as one of the basic blocking and tackling techniques and so what we're going to do is we're going to just talk through essentially I want to talk through what are some of the what are some of the types of flow charts or process maps and we want to talk about how we can develop complete and consistent process Maps that we can use to communicate to analyze and to find and fix problems to eliminate where we should be collecting more data to get buy-in for what we need to do or what we've done and so forth all right so this is just going to be a short coverage I don't include I don't claim that it's that it's totally that it's comprehensive where do you find process maps well you find them all over the place but we're we're talking about it right now is maybe in creating an as is process map exactly how you make to be process Maps can depend on the context and we can talk about that if some people call them future state there's also a future state value stream maps which are related to this anyway we're talking about and making as his process maps in this particular section so let's start out by talking about sort of why would you use a process map and I think the answer should be fairly clear to us and I talked about it a little bit of fairly detailed fashion already that a process map seemed that it's a visual display actually going to put my pointer back on seeing that it is a visual display wait a second might be better idea seeing that it is a visual display you know we we can we can use process maps for different reasons right so we we actually get to see whatever that entity is how it flows through in various various places right so we can say first and we can also talk about for example we can use it to identify what that sequence of steps is we can also talk about where that sequence starts and stops what decisions are along the way usually people use diamonds for decisions and boxes for process steps and there's a lot more to it with Visio you can add lots and lots and lots of different symbols I like to keep it to a minimum and we'll talk about that just as we go through but we can also look neat about it is we can identify perhaps where errors are occurring like what happens if we had errors there errors you can point them out right or we can say hmm maybe I want to collect data maybe I want to collect data there I can see that this is a little bit slow I might want to collect data there okay and and so forth okay so we can use it for that but we can also use it to aid in communication right because we can get everybody on the same page to say this actually is what the process looks like in reality a process map is just a model just like anything else is it's a model of how the process actually works it's not really how the process works it's a model of how the process works so we all know that if we went down to by the employee we might find or you can buy the the the particular instance of the employee doing it we might find that you know employees do things differently you know every day every time they execute the process they need to have slightly might find slight differences we want to get that process map at the level that makes sense for us to solve problems and no deeper than that okay the idea isn't to say here's what reality is the idea is to say let's get it to a level to say this approximates reality well enough so that we can make decisions on what to fix where to collect data and what the future state of this process might look like okay here are some typical symbols I like the symbols on the left hand side the the process step the decision Dimond the starter end point and I also use off page connectors because I like to not use I like to not make super super complex process Maps on any one page like I want to go to the next a gel I'll make an off page connector so it's easily communicated the ones on the right are other things that sometimes people use plug people use cans for databases that little D symbol for delays and or the or gate or I'm sorry NAND gate if you're into electronics and then the reports generated sometimes paperwork so forth all right let's talk about before we before we kind of talk a little bit more let's talk about the types of process Maps so process maps are things that you can make in various places at various times in the process so we all know that for example a Sai POC is a type of process map I'm not going to go through that again but a sidewalk is very often very good in the beginning of a project because it just gets our bearings on sort of what we're what the scope of the project is what the basic flow is where the problems might lie where we might collect data but there's other types of process Maps that maybe help more helpful there's what's called a top-down process map there's a linear process map which will be similar to just an ordinary what we normally call a flow diagram or a flow chart this is probably the most common in the most conventional there's an opportunity flow chart which is often breaks things up into value-added non-value-added sometimes that can be very helpful or a happy path and exception that's another way I think about it and finally there's a swimlanes one and what I should what I should tell you is I think that my personal opinion this is opinion guys all right my personal opinion is that this is basically the order that you should do these that you should consider doing these okay a lot of people start from a sidewalk and jump right to a swim lane diagram BAM they don't do a high level value stream map they do right to a swim lane diagram I think sometimes this can get us in trouble because the breakdown may or may not be helpful and swimlane flowcharts can be very complex very very fast so so I would recommend starting with a top-down and then maybe working way down into this depending on you know how quickly you want to do how valuable the linear one might be and so forth ok let's start out with with a few guidelines and this is kind of do us for just about any process map sort of advice that that that you can talk about you can add your own to this as well this is just sort of advice that I have coming off of both the top of my head and some experience number one start from a very high level build your ownership and shared understanding first with the team problem solving comes later don't try and solve problems right away and make sure that you involve the appropriate stakeholders that is so important if if possible before you do the process mapping walk or observe the process somehow beforehand go out with a clipboard just take notes or go out without a clipboard just kind of observe it see what people do what they don't do before you have the processing session um I like facilitating with the team using if I'm live and on the spot I like facilitating with the team with sticky notes and butcher paper rather than projecting and using a computer program like Visio doing that directly I know a lot of people like to Visio directly what I find is that when that happens you as if you're the facilitator or if you're the person who's Manning the Visio there's two things at Camp and one is you become the Bob there's a few things that can happen one is you become the bottleneck number two is you become the voice for what really happens because it's hard for people to contradict the person who's driving and it's harder for it not for everybody but for many people and even most and then third is there's also when you start putting things into Visio there's also cost associated with redoing the process map or moving one step from one place to another or taking out a step but you think doesn't really exist or is not profitable to have in there and because of that it becomes a mental barrier so for example if you have something in Visio and you have the structure and it's already up there's a reluctance of people to tear it apart as opposed to if you have sticky notes there's less of our elections it's very easy to pull them up put them different places and so forth all right butcher paper is just something it's like a long roll right so you can stick it up on a wall and then you can roll it up afterward they sell that either have butchers but increasingly now at places like staples or office Depot they'll have a long roll of paper that can roll out will roll back um don't use too many symbols um just confusing remember flowcharts are meant to communicate not not to be reality okay so something that's simpler time to communicate that's great if the distinction of one symbol versus another is helpful use it otherwise don't here is a very difficult one try and keep a consistent level of detail throughout the throughout the map okay so don't for example if you are if you were processed mapping out how something is ordered at McDonald's you wouldn't have cook food and then ten or fifteen steps on on giving the food to a customer you wouldn't have one step for cooking the food and then ten or fifteen for delivering to the customer okay try and keep it at the same level on one process map if you need to do more detail on one area do a drill down and then finally make sure that you validate the the process map with you with the available or an appropriate stakeholders and validate ins may be a strong word again going with the idea of models make sure that it's useful is it though is it more or less correct at the level than it's at okay keep it simple and readable so that's easily grasped we'll have some other guidelines when we go along we look at some of these process Maps I do want to say one other thing it's sort of like a facilitation trick when when you're actually doing the this might pretend that you're the entity that's going through so if it's a patient you might pretend you're the patient when you're facilitating and say okay I'm patient Joe first I do this would tell me what it is and then when to that and then what happens and then what happens and then what happens to me if you pretend that you are the the thing that's going through a lot of times people can communicate to you as if you're that thing even if you're a piece of paper or a database file or something like that the technique works if you're uh I mean take it if you're if you're like a piece of paper an application you say I'm an application what's the first thing that happens when I go to a customer well they fill you out great so I get filled out and then what happens cetera so it's a nice little technique anthropomorphize things people can relate okay let's take a look at a couple more whoops I'm sorry there's my pen let's take a look at a couple of these process amounts so a top down is an excellent process map that I find very few people using and I like it because we can put it right in Excel very easily in my Excel lover but essentially what you do is you take the side and kind of flip it on its side right so if this is the P inside pocket flip it on its side and then you build one level down from each of these again there may be some complexity as to step 1 step 2 step 3 step 4 step 5 maybe some of these are concurrent or all that you're simply very much like in a work breakdown structure in project management you're simply saying okay here are all the items for example in this one that says this is for compliance reporting where that the main functions are received a request forward to reporting groups complete the reports consolidate them send them to the DOI those are the five basic things that we have to do then you ask okay within receiving your quest what are the basic things that you need to do within there well I need to take the fax phone call or email I need to log it into the database I need to send an acknowledgement to the person who sent it to me and there may be other things that I need to do and so forth it's an excellent way to start out before you go into doing a more detailed flowchart let's take a look at the next one which is your basic linear flowchart and for this one what I've done is I've got a this one happens to be for booking a flight on an online now it doesn't say a lot but but let's just kind of walk through it so again this is fairly simple flowchart I did it to just be illustrative if we're starting over here the first thing is I need to log on to the particular site I don't know if you use Orbitz or price line or whatever let's say I'm using Orbitz I log onto Orbitz and if I'm not new I've already done this before I'd simply enter my flight information okay I generate some available flights and if I don't need to try other airports I simply select a flight I confirm my flight info and then I book the flight and then done that's what I call the happy path the happy path is on the top and for all the exceptions I go to I go below it okay so for example if I am a new subscriber I need to do some things if I do need to generate a if I do need to try other airports like let's say I fly out of it under you are quite often but it's a very small airport so I sometimes look for places like in Syracuse or Rochester New York or Binghamton to see if there are other flights available to them or sometimes even Philadelphia there are other flights available if I need to make other purchase I confirm the flight info if I need to make other purchases then I might have to reserve a car or hotel or whatever and book all the other items okay so this these are the exception paths so one thing that's pretty evident here is there's a clear direction to this so let me talk about some of the good features of this you'll notice that there's and some of it are not so good because I've had to smash them onto a PowerPoint with a title and all the rest of that stuff but one of the things that's nice is it says what the process is it has a you know a general header this is booking an online flight it says who the creators were this was the web P I team whatever that is and it says the date of creation I created this on 227 2008 all that's kind of helpful because it it puts it in contact maybe things have changed since 2008 okay so we know how sort of relevant this flow chart is second it gives a key it says what each of the symbols means third is it doesn't use too many symbols and the fourth and maybe this is the most important it's all at the same the fourth one it's all at the same level we don't have super duper details one place and scant details and another and then finally it it's a it has a direction to it so by looking at it without taking too long you can quickly ascertain there's a direction to this it goes left to right and exceptions go top to bottom okay so it has some good features that's a linear flow chart now sometimes linear flow charts can be turned into sometimes directly into what's called an opportunity flow chart so in an opportunity flow chart what we're doing is we're looking at whoops backwards and forwards there we go is there an opportunity flow chart admittedly we're missing some things here right because I don't have a key for the color or the or the the symbols or the who did this and the date okay but the features that I want you to see is first of all it does have a direction and it has a line here that kind of divides the top and bottom that says okay here's what is the process when it works well and here are the opportunities that we can look to maybe make improvements so that's what it is it's kind of like showing where the opportunities are to make improvements now if you've done this happy path versus non happy path sometimes it's self-evident and you can see it very easily other times people will take a linear flow chart like this circle different areas like I might say well you know here is where we have a real problem because when people are new subscribers they often drop out of the process so we're going to look at this right here as as our biggest opportunity okay so anyway this one happens to be for a process proceeding and serving a customer and so what I've got here is I've got the seating the patron is the seat available oh it's not we put your name on a list and you see them lobby or the bar and we just know from experience that there is a lot of churn and customer dissatisfaction in that particular area and there's you know what there's no value add what we say your names on the list nor is there a value add when we don't have the ingredients and have to cancel the ticket or when we when we put the order together for say a family and we're missing certain things enough you're like me but I hate going to restaurant where you make the order and it's delivered over the course of say 20 minutes where everybody's getting their different orders my son gets his first and then my daughter gets his butters five minutes later than I get mine and my wife gets hers and um you know my son is done before any of us even start to eat it's problem maybe in some cases it's not a problem but for me it is so that might be a place where I might want to look for improvements anyway nice little view can make it pretty clear alright now here's the swimlane flow chart some people call these deployment flow charts or just be aware of that swim lanes are becoming so ubiquitous now that that many people think it's the only flow chart it's not and it can be very complicated very fast so just be aware of that here in this case we've got process steps that are segmented by which brought in this case which branch of the business or which area of the business is executing on these so for example the Home Office does an awful lot of the work up front but they ping HR once in a while and the department office is the one that makes the final approval these are great for perhaps finding where there's a lot of back-and-forth or lack of ownership of a process sometimes they can be one of the reasons why they're so ubiquitous is because they're helpful in illuminating where problems are but having said that they can be very very complex very fast and if they don't communicate well they don't they're not really going to set you up for making those improvements so do try the other ones first I would suggest usually doing a certainly a top-down first before going into a soon lane or even top-down in a linear before going into a swimlane flowchart but again it just shows the sequence of steps in here in this case I've simplified this greatly by not putting in any decision diamonds so this might even be just the happy path that's there okay and we've already talked through this but um just a few features on a flowchart must-haves and I've broken some of this you might want to look back and see in the flowcharts I've got where I've made some mistakes flowcharts really need to have header information if they're going to be published and part of a control plan they need to have the process name the names that people created it last date of updation of when it was updated all flowcharts need to have a clear direction left-to-right this one is violated all the time people go left to right back to left again very very difficult to follow us or follow the flow of those I do understand that there's always challenges getting things onto a single page or even multiple pages that's the cross that we have to bear when we're doing process mapping that we have to find some way to communicate most people I think I think your two choices are top to bottom and left to right most people these days do left to right for various reasons one is that if you're thinking about butcher paper you can get it all onto a wall in say a room and it the left or right seems to make sentence most people think of time as traveling from left to right that tends to work up to that from top to bottom okay - but you should use your own style guides if your department process excellence has them and in have one bottom line now clear directions I believe every flowchart that you make third thing is consistent level of detail so again don't be real detailed in one place not detailed at another start end points need to be identified and you want to have a hundred percent closed loops if you don't maybe that means that there's a real hole in the as this process that's okay but you don't want to have things that are left open just for the sake of leaving them open if they really do need to be if they really aren't closed in reality it's good to point that out some things that are nice to have is to number the steps and have a symbol key this is a the simple key is a must-have if you're using lots of symbols if you're only using squares and diamonds then it's probably not such a big deal most people can figure that out numbered steps are often very helpful although when you start to number you'll see how it's often very difficult the number particularly things like swimlanes if you're doing multiple pages or multiple stages you know this is step one point one point two at one point one point three and all that it can be it can be a bit of a pain okay now what are some of the things that you look for when you do flowchart analysis well when we look at something we're going to look at for example do we have an inefficient sequence of steps maybe we're making lots of decisions near the end of the process or maybe we have some redundant staffs or maybe there's some back-and-forth and maybe there's some authorizations it can help us understand where defects are produced where inventory build ups are happening where there's we work where there's delays let me just show you this very quickly by looking at if we go back to the slide 172 this was a process map that I actually had built for a client of mine where they were hiring a contractor to do some insurance adjusting in some cases and this is a real legitimate process map you might think oh my gosh that's not deep enough you know I need to go deeper but the point is we need to go deep enough to uh to to solve problems so if we look at this when an opportunity was identified there was an original call that went into a department office and they asked do you have an employee available for this particular assignment if the answer was no they literally hire a contractor they'd go out they'd say okay we're going to hire a contractor all right if if they did have an employee available they'd assign that employee after they hired the contractor and believe it or not this was the order they'd say okay does this contractor have the right skills the answer was no they go back and call the department office again but they just had a list of contractors whoops the second thing if he did have the right skills or she had the right skills they'd set up the office and if all the criteria were met there was maybe three or four criteria which sometimes we're not met in which they have to go through and do the whole thing over again they get the signature from the big Mucka Mucka up at the corporate okay now the interesting thing is there's this you'll notice it's very inefficient order of steps right they're hiring somebody before they even know that this person has the right skills literally that was one of the fixes was to say every department office every branch office needs to have an up-to-date understanding of and artifacts to support this like a an index this was done in early 2000s so Internet was it wasn't easy to just do this on the internet but we provided them with a with essentially a catalog that was searchable by using of some clicks where you could identify who had what skills third thing is don't set up the office before you know that they need all the criteria and finally be darn sure that when we when it comes to signature time we've got all our ducks in a row we're never going to have to go back in fact we might want to get that signature upfront when we hire the contractor to begin with um anyway the point is it was deep enough to solve a number of problems and to greatly improve the process we didn't need to go deeper than that because remember at the final analysis what we're doing with the process map is not our job is not as a historian okay we're not historians in the process excellent business excellence business we're problem solvers and so let's keep that in mind go as deep as you need to but no deeper okay so that's about it folks um there's a couple of exercises at the end I think you would do well to do the exercise one for hiring a new employee we all probably think - enough of an extent you can understand sort of what needs to be done um but be interesting to - once you do that go ahead and compare with another person in class and see how it differs and then exercise - is a nice one because that I'm asking to take 20 minutes or less on but this is a call center process for somebody who was for a company that sells budgeting software and you might want to record by looking at this following process which is given on slide 180 for what you would do give a critique because there's no skin on the game we don't know hid in the game we don't know who did this but might do a critique on two things you might say number one what's wrong with this process map if you were doing a process map you know what made it hard to read what made it bad what made it confusing that might be one thing you might want to talk about like for example I got it going left and right I don't like that okay that's one of the things second thing is you might want to look into what are some of the things that are problematic with this just as an example just as an example we find that there is a database here the people are documenting - there is a spreadsheet that people are documenting - and there's a logbook that people are documenting - are all these data sources necessary could they be consolidated that's just one tiny tip of the iceberg so if you're interesting to say well let's find you 10 things wrong with this or 20 this is not believe me this is not a pretty picture either in the way that it was done or in what's actually written there okay so have fun with that and I think you'll you'll enjoy spending a little time with that so what we really talked about in this module summary was how to develop a complete consistent as is process map we didn't talk about future stay but you should be pretty comfortable as saying I can use this process for starting with a top down and then going to a more detailed process map to get to a point where I can problem solve we chose you how we talked about how to choose an effective type of flow chart when and how to analyze some of the flow chart for some improvement opportunities again if you have any questions whatsoever you should contact me at M sable dot M Zabel at straight line pas calm and happy to answer any of your questions hope you found this helpful and we'll see you down the road

Channel: Mark Zabel

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Keywords: business process mapping tutorial, business process mapping examples, process flow diagram tutorial, process mapping tutorial, business process mapping, process map, how to process map, how to create a process map, process mapping in visio, process mapping in excel, flowchart tutorial, process mapping, flowchart in excel, create a flowchart in excel, process mapping six sigma, swimlane diagram tutorial, swimlane diagram, Process, how to make a flowchart in excel

Id: LJwKZuQUb7g

Length: 32min 39sec (1959 seconds)

Published: Mon May 14 2012