Client: “So we’ll have yet another document. What’s the point?”
Have you ever had someone on the client side question the value of “documenting” the process? It’s a valid question; what is the point of creating yet another document that is bound to get outdated (and join a million other outdated documents), soon after we have spent so many man hours creating it?
This question, however, is also one of the many giveaway symptoms of a company’s/business unit’s low process awareness.
“The Document”, i.e. the process flow, is merely an outcome of the ‘process of eliciting the process’– the unveiling, a result of being made aware of the process ‘in focus’.
The true value, in fact, is in the “Aha!” moment, when everyone sees the same process.
Another way to picture this is to imagine a large, 3-D cube in the middle of the room. Now imagine five people, sitting around the cube, viewing the cube from their perspective, but no one really has the full cube in their vision.
They ‘know’ parts of the cube (their parts of the process). Maybe the parts they have touched or played around with (parts of the process that they built, oversaw, executed, or troubleshot.) Perhaps they even, sort of ‘know’ the parts their neighbor had ‘built’. Or maybe they think they know the part their neighbor built, but it’s a bit jumbled up in their mind.
With everyone in the room, when you begin by asking each of them about what they see (what is the process or how do they perform their parts of the process), mini discoveries tend to happen. Now when we start modeling, creating a visualization (a process flow) of their ethereal cube, everyone in the room gets to observe and learn of the other person’s part. When we goad them to be more specific, they add more fidelity, more texture to the model. People may even question someone else’s part. (Clarify the process logic. Do you really do this task first and then the other task, or is it the other way around?)
Gradually, we arrive at a common shared understanding of the end-to-end process visually. We all see the same cube. It is at this place that we revel in seeing the bigger picture while observing all the specific details a notion that I was first introduced to in Tacit Dimension, a 90 odd page fascinating book by the Hungarian polymath, Michael Polanyi.
On another note, this process could change, as we change the “focal window” or the ‘ends’ of this end—to-end process. I will cover more of the “Focal Window Approach”™ in another post.
It is clear how “elicitation and visualization” can lead to:
• Discovering recurring pain points (These two steps always give me an issue!)
• Potential inherent process design problems (Why do we get files in this format from HR? Why do we trigger this batched job at 9:00 AM on Monday instead of 12:00 midnight on Sunday? Why is there a 15 day delay between these two tasks?)
• Potential process execution discrepancies (I thought we were supposed to do it this way, but apparently we don’t.)
• Potential best practices (I like how you do it; I should do it the same way.)
• Even individual productivity gains
Beyond these benefits, this discovery could enable a successful process optimization phase. Now, I do not believe that we always need to have current state models before designing and deploying an improved future state process in all cases, but that’s a conversation for another time.