Process Mapping Tactics— Secrets to supporting the strategy

A friend of mine has a growing recruiting company. A few weeks ago, he asked his Office Manager to call and ask me for some help.

“I've been asked to find a tool to map our processes with,” she said, “but Visio and ABC Flowcharter look like overkill.”

I offered to show her how to use PowerPoint for simple flowcharting, and we met the next day to go over it. My secret agenda was to find out what the real process mapping need was, because she let slip that they were having all kinds of confusion.

I took a look at an example of what they'd been using, and I knew instantly what the problem was. There before me was a simple flowchart. It was frightening enough that it didn't have any decision-points, which we usually represent as diamonds. It also had a key at the bottom that contained a big clue to what was going wrong. Green boxes represented tasks that were performed by Sales, blue boxes were performed by Recruiting, and yellow boxes were performed by both.

I had a real problem with that key, so I decided to show her how “swim-lane” or “river-channel” flowcharts work. I drew a column for each of the entities (Sales and Recruiting) and then added two more: Customer and Management. I started to draw the same flowchart, but put the process box for each task under the column of who was responsible for getting it done. Her eyes lit up at the simplicity of how it showed both process and responsibility without having to refer to a key. Then she asked the payoff question that I was leading her to: What happens when two different groups are responsible for the same task?

“That,” I said, “is your real problem.” I went on to explain that whenever you make two groups responsible for completing a task, there will always be a problem getting it done. No one will feel like they “own” it.
“But Sales and Recruiting meet together to help make their decisions,” she said. “How can we show that process?”
“Well,” I said, “are both entities doing the same thing in those meetings?”

“I guess,” she replied, “that Sales is really there to make sure the candidate is right for the client, and Recruiting is there to make sure the client is right for the candidate.”

“Then you can show these as simultaneous actions in different boxes under different swim-lanes,” I said.

As we worked through a little more of the flow, it quickly became obvious that there were a number of processes that had shared responsibility. The process-mapping tool was a very small issue in a much bigger problem.

I haven't checked back to find out how things are progressing, but I can guarantee that things have improved if she took my advice. What is the motivation for someone implementing a process when they won't be held accountable for getting it done?

Professionalism aside, we're all human, and as humans we tend to raise the priority of activities that our bosses' will “call us on.” Assign tasks and processes to one entity (if it is a department, then make the manager accountable). If you find yourself having to assign them to two entities at once, think a little harder. You will be able to break the task or process into the appropriate number of subtasks to get the responsibilities pinned down, and you'll find it a lot easier to manage.

© 2003 M. A. “Ryan” Yuhas
InterDimension Strategies Inc.