Rapid Process Understanding

It’s very rare that an organisation has the opportunity to start something from clean sheet. Organisations develop organically over a long period and become used to a degree of inefficiency and inflexibility, rather like owning an old pair of comfortable but tatty slippers. Processes that have been established for a long period of time become entrenched so deeply into the organisation that they become subconscious, and rapidly become ingrained as “the way things get done around here”. Even young start-up organisations, in the dash to get up and running, often create processes almost by accident which, unless revisited later on, can become stumbling blocks on the way towards company growth. It is a healthy thing therefore, to occasionally take time out from the day-to-day running of the organisation and review how things are done, when they are done, and what causes them to start happening. In short, undertake a process analysis of your organisation.

The prospect of opening up an organisation to process analysis is daunting and is usually only considered when there are major problems. The type of analysis, as taught in business school, makes a detailed study of information passed between functions covering the triggering events, timing, content and interface. Several intervention techniques are used although the most common approach is to interview the various process actors, a long and laborious process, and map the processes onto either a wall-chart or a series of post-it notes. While the output is very detailed it also tends to be a multi-silo view of the process, which often fails to capture the informal elements of the process and its broader impacts. What is preferable in these circumstances is a rapid diagnostic approach that enables the organisation to be quickly mapped and the problem areas identified. The understanding of how these processes work and where the issues are, is held in a place that is seldom looked into: the heads of your workers.

To gain access to that knowledge it is necessary to bring the key workers together in a workshop environment and use a consensual mapping approach to capture the output of the session. By representing the organisation and its processes with an easily understood roadmap metaphor, this approach builds a map, which graphically displays the formal and informal interactions as well as the bottlenecks and sticking points. By building the map in a workshop environment with the staff members responsible for the day-to-day execution of the processes, a consensus view of how the organisation actually works emerges. This effectively documents the often labyrinthine ways in which things get done, captures the informal hand-offs and communications and will also, if properly facilitated, provide a forum for the group to point out shortcomings and issues in the various interactions.

This technique, called Rapid Process Design (RPD) initially facilitates the documentation of complex multi-level systems problems, isolating both formal and informal processes that are being operated in an organisation. The technique works by firstly identifying the relevant organisational units, and then working through each of the major processes, sales, order taking, order fulfilment, goods returns etc, so that the contact points, actors, information systems and issues are captured in a map format. Once the map has been built the next step is to attach numeric values to each of the processes in terms of either financial impact or volumes. As this is a simple metaphor to understand, it becomes straightforward to identify where the major sticking points in the organisation are and the relative impact and priority of each.

Further analysis takes place by creating overlay maps. Typically the first overlay would be to understand where there is IT support for each of he processes. This rapidly enables the organisation to understand not only where a process would benefit from automation and a ball-park figure for the financial or volume impact it would have, but also to appreciate where current IT investments are not performing well enough. Further investigation could then identify if the problem lies in the system itself, or in the level of training and usage by the workforce.

RPD has been used successfully for many years across a variety of industry types, including mature organisations that have grown through mergers and acquisitions, start-ups that have been created in a hurry, and organisations that are looking to divest themselves of poorly performing divisions. Used as a rapid diagnostic, RPD quickly enables management to identify where to focus their efforts. Used as a planning tool, RPD can facilitate optimisation of the key revenue generating processes. Used as a facilitation methodology, RPD can create a common language of understanding between departments and divisions allowing them to understand the impact of their working practices on the rest of the organisation. As Donald Rumsfeld so eloquently put it “as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don’t know we don’t know”. RPD is an effective tool for discovering those unknown unknowns.