Video Transcript Below:
Process mapping your business. This seems like a daunting task to people that haven’t done it before, but it is so easy that I’m going to show you a very simple example about how to do this. There’s lots of tools we can use to do process mapping, if you’re not comfortable with using your computer or you just want to do it in a team environment.
How I Get Started
My favorite way to do this is to get started with a pad of sticky notes and a giant sheet of paper or just your desk. Everybody writes down all the little pieces of what they’re doing and they stick it on the table and you start to organize things into a logical fashion. and then take a picture of it afterwards, you can use that picture to then go to the computer later and draw it nicely into the software.
So the software we’re going to use today is called Miro. If you, if you have the Microsoft Suite, you can probably figure out how to do this inside of Power Point or Microsoft Word. Microsoft’s product for this is called Visio There’s also Lucid Chart, but we’re going to use Miro today because it’s free, It’s online, You can get started right away. There’s nothing stopping you from signing up and creating an account. So I’m gonna switch to the screen now and show you.
Using Miro
Okay. So here we go. Here is what Miro looks like it runs in your web browser. I will zoom out just so you can see the overall flow chart. I already built this just to save some time, but it’s really easy. So what I did here is I grab something called the swim lane and each swim lane, I’ve put a person that’s involved in the process.
Process Mapping – Making Pancakes
So we’ve got a parent, a child, number one and a child, number two. So we’re assuming there’s two kids in this family and you can grab these, the tools over here. You can watch all kinds of tutorials on Miro. I won’t really show you how to find the swim lane, but it’s pretty easy. So every workflow, every flow chart starts with a start box. And obviously the parent is the one initially initiating this. So they start, first thing they’re going to do is turn on the stove, then they gather all the equipment and ingredients for what they think they’re going to need for breakfast. And they asked the Children what, what they want in their pancakes.
So we’ve already assumed that the process here involves creating pancakes. The Children are asked this, they have a decision to make. So every step, every basic step just goes in a typical box. Usually it’s a rectangle. You can color code or however you want. There’s really no standard formula here. But so I’ve selected yellow, decisions, questions, those are always shown in a diamond shape.
So question blueberry or banana and the outcomes of those are what you put on the lines here. So this child number one would have selected banana. If they chose banana, then they would request banana pancakes. If they wanted blueberries, then instead their answer would have been blueberry and they request blueberry pancakes. Same thing with child number two. They posed the same question. They have to put out the same output. Those outputs all flow back to the parent where there is a question or a decision matrix, a decision point that says are the Children in agreement and this is a fun morning struggle. Yes or no.
So if the answer is no and this parents in particular doesn’t want to make both kinds of pancakes, then they will request consensus or reconsideration and that will go back to the Children and you can see who knows what your family is like, how you grew up, which child is the one that always gets to win the argument or if they have some sort of, you know, fairness policy or they just fight each other until they come up with an answer or they just, you know, one is really, doesn’t care and change their mind that I’m assuming is a sub process.
So you don’t have to get into the weeds on your process, workflows all the time. If you know, there’s something that just happens that you might need to dig into later, you can put that as a sub process. And you can see the shape here is a little different. It’s got two lines on the side. I’ve color coded it differently. That’s how you represent a sub process. So it’s kind of like a magic box. Everything goes in there and whatever happens, eventually the output comes out.
Applying the Pancake Example to a Real Business
And this, this you’ll recognize in every part of your business. For example, you know, receptionist answers the phone, phone call and conversation could be a sub process and then the outputs from whatever happens during that entire phone call are the next steps. So in this case, we have requested consensus for reconsideration if they deliberate and they come back and they’re still not an agreement, well we’re following this line back up to here to the same question.
Are they an agreement? And we will keep doing this loop until they come to an agreement. Now, of course, your process, your breakfast could be totally different. There could be something in there that allows for a different thing if this has happened more than three or four times. This is just a simple process map you can add in whatever you want.
And that’s the beauty of process mapping in our scenario. Eventually they come to agreement. And from that, we have two yes’s. Either banana pancakes are gonna get made or blueberry pancakes are going to get made. depending on what gets, what comes out of this decision. Our process flow is different if they’ve requested blueberry pancakes. Well, then we’re going to cook blueberry pancakes.
It’s pretty obvious after that, go to the end, eat breakfast if they’ve picked banana pancakes. Well, if you’re like me, you’re going to ask Google or Alexa to play Jack Johnson’s banana pancake song because I’m a dad And two things are gonna happen from that. I’m gonna cook the banana pancakes. Both of my Children are going to groan because they’re tired of hearing that song with banana pancakes. And then we go to eat breakfast and end the process.
So you can see different decisions, have different outputs. You don’t have to consider all the weird things that happen like the groaning or the music or whatever on the simple line, but you can outline what’s going to happen based on different decisions. And now you can look at this and go Where can I save some time? Well, maybe I’m gonna go back to this whole decision part here.
Zooming out on the process and what’s really needed?
Let’s zoom out for a second. This seems pretty messy. Do I really care, that I’m making two different kinds of pancakes. Is it really that big of a deal to split the batter into two bowls at first and put banana in one bowl and blueberry blueberries in the other. That would change this entire map here because when they ask the questions, it won’t really matter if they’re in agreement, we can remove that entire sub process.
In fact, upfront here, when we gather the equipment and ingredients, we would probably add in a few steps that say split the ball into two, add the ingredients or wait until the Children give us our answers and then put the ingredients in the bowl. Because what if they want to add raspberries? What if they wanted strawberries? in this process there’s no room for that. But what if you wanted to increase your customer service and say, you know, we can put whatever you want in it.
Well, we just need to modify our workflow and you’re looking at this going, you know what? We could probably get higher sales if we allowed for that by making this change up front. Really easy to see that kind of stuff when you’ve process mapped it and go, wow.
We are wasting a ton of time here with this deliberation sub process and making sure that kids in agreement, why don’t we just change it up front? So we don’t even have to worry about this stuff down here. You know, maybe to avoid the groans. You play the song when you first get the ingredients out. Who knows?
So you can see this is this probably took me, I don’t know, 5, 10 minutes, you could have done this with sticky notes. But this is a great way to just look at the process from a high level and see where all your complexity is and you can even start putting some times to it. Saying this part of the process from this point here to this point here, this takes 15 minutes and the rest of it takes a minute.
Well, we need to zone in on this 15 minute part, you know, put that up in front of your staff and say, okay, everybody, how can we rethink this entire part of the process to make it faster? Or, can we break out a part of the process to run concurrently with the rest of it so that we can still get to the end goal faster overall without having to hold up the rest of the process before we get there.
No more excuses…
That’s how easy it is to do process mapping. You don’t have any excuses anymore. The tools are available online for free. The sticky notes are either in your desk or at the store nearby and cost you a dollar. You will see how important this is and you’ll get some great insights into where you’re stumbling blocks are where your efficiencies can be found.
So again, hit the like or subscribe button below. Ask me some questions in the comments. Tell me all about the process improvements you figured out after doing some process mapping. Let me know how great it was or how hard it was. And let’s keep the conversation going.