Business process mapping is among the most essential best practices when it comes to business process improvement and automation. A process map can help in achieving what you can’t without it, as it gives a complete picture of your business processes and operations.
Process mapping lets you discover the effect of decisions, the tasks needed, the flow of information and usage of resources, and a clear sequence of your business operations and how they impact each other, which is one of its greatest benefits.
To do process mapping successfully and efficiently, whatever your business size and industry are, here are 5 great steps you need to follow.
Set your clear goals and processes that need improvement
Before starting to map your processes, you need to think of the goals you need to achieve with mapping. You may want to only map the processes of a certain department and not your whole business.
A process map doesn’t need to include every existing business process through your whole business, and that is an advantage that you need to consider. Set specific goals or certain departments or aspects that need enhancement, before beginning to make a process map.
Engage your employees or team members
A process map can be created by one individual, but it can be better when created by a group of people having different perspectives and backgrounds.
Consider building a team of people you trust their visions and approaches when creating the process map, and make sure that this group can work together on sharing their perspectives of the various processes. Surely, you need people who understand much about the processes you need to enhance and map.
Manage the mapping process itself
Process mapping can be a fun thing to do. It can take much of your time and go to a wider scope than planned, and even a wider scope than you need.
That is why you need to make a decision of when to stop, what critical info you need, and what to ignore. The sections can be even developed separately by group members. Then brought together to avoid wasting time of the group and yourself.
Use standards and don’t write much
The purpose of the business process map is to be a visual map to be used instead of much writing. That’s why you don’t need to write much when making the map. Only write short notes if needed.
To make the map efficiently you need to use the standard symbols already being used for the purpose, which are:
- Rectangle for steps or processes
- Diamonds for decisions
- Arrows for showing directions
- Oval circles for starts and ends
- Parallelograms for data
Consider group and solo brainstorming
If you want your processes to become better then you need to think of new solutions. This could need you to brainstorm whether with a group or solely.
After brainstorming each of the group members, you can bring the ideas together and even every single map designed by each member, and start making one process map that you will use.
