Episode 7: Why You Need to Process Map with a Pro

In this final episode of our process mapping series, we explore why hiring a professional to facilitate process mapping can be a game-changer. From quicker results and reduced team burden to unbiased insights and higher-quality output, this episode breaks down six compelling reasons to bring in an expert. Whether you're a decision-maker or a process improvement practitioner, you’ll find valuable guidance on how to get the most from this foundational tool. 

Transcript

Thanks for returning to The Process Improvement Practitioners Show for Episode 7 – Process Map with A Pro.   Our purpose here is to enable you, the problem solver, to solve business problems through change.  As always, please feel free to provide feedback and discuss these ideas on LinkedIn or YouTube.  

This is the last podcast on process mapping.  In the first episode of this series, I discussed the why of process mapping.  Then I discussed how to process map, and that discussion was actually beyond the nuts and bolts of mapping and into the preparation and the facilitation of a mapping session.  My approach in this podcast series in general is to try to go beyond the strict “how” of the tools and go into the human element more, go into how to get more effectiveness out of your tools.  I assume anyone can find content on how to do a logistic regression or how to create a SIPOC, but I feel I can be more helpful to provide a perspective based on experience and hard lessons learned, paired with a long-term focus on building a continuous improvement culture.  

So typically, my audience is the process improvement leader who is doing the work of process improvement!  However today I’m going to assume that you, the gentle listener, is also a decision-maker with some ability to spend money on process improvement initiatives, because we are going to talk about why you should consider hiring an outsider professional to perform process mapping in your organization.  If you are a process improvement “doer” this will also resonate, because this applies to you going out and getting work for yourself!  In this profession you need to find ways to create strong demand for you and your team because if you don’t you will eventually be shut down.  So you need to internalize your value proposition as you seek to sell your work (literally and figuratively) and build out your project backlog or portfolio.

Let’s get to it!  Why should you hire a pro to do your process mapping?  

Let’s list my six reasons up front.  

1.    Quicker cycle time

2.    Reduced effort on the business

3.    Neutrality and Empathy

4.    Consistent and professional output

5.    Quality elicitation

6.    Try your process improvement expert before you buy

Quicker cycle time

This is a great example of a situation where adding resources to a project actually helps to get work done sooner.  Bringing in a set of hands that can take this deliverable off the plate of someone else is going to help.  Developing a process map is a pretty standalone thing that a qualified process improvement professional will be able to complete for you, and quicker to be sure.  If you need further proof of this, listen to the “How to Process Map” episode and envision dropping that task into the lap of your harried process owner or operations leader, who is no doubt fighting daily fires trying to keep the wheels on the bus.  Having a pro come in means the business can focus on having the team show up to sessions and brain dump with not a lot of advance preparation.  The pro will also be mapping in real-time, and gaining agreement throughout, so your finished product will be ready more quickly.  You should have this deliverable done in a few days’ time for a typical process map.

Reduced effort on the business

We’ve already started to touch on reason 2: reducing effort on your team.  I think it’s safe to assume that if we are talking about improving these processes that things on the floor may not be running smoothly right now.  That suggests your team may be beat up already just trying to keep performance up.  You should really want to take some work off their plate both to get this core deliverable right, get an easy early win to build confidence, and to enable them to show up, turn off the world for 90 minutes, put the phones and laptops away, and just brain dump on what is going on.  Sessions like this can become cathartic for your folks!  And if you intend to have these people make changes, you will need their capacity soon enough.  This is a good opportunity to take away a task that they don’t know how to do well, because you will need them to do work later that only they can do: leading and motivating their teams to change the way they work!  Let’s make sure when it’s time for that they have a full tank of gas and as much of a tailwind as we can give them.

Neutrality and Empathy

            A process improvement pro will bring two key advantages that can’t come from an insider: neutrality and empathy.  First: neutrality.  Imagine this scenario: the leader of the team is asking subordinates what the process steps are.  What if that leader had told a subordinate to implement change x and/or change y.  And what if those changes didn’t get done?  This puts that subordinate in the awkward position of declaring to the team that actually, no boss, I wasn’t able to deliver that change.  Or worse yet, they lie and say it’s in place!  That’s going to hurt us later to not have the truth on paper, not to mention starting off on the wrong foot playing a game of Who Shot John.  Now hopefully this hypothetical conversation already happened and the leader already knows the answer, but why create the opportunity for people to change what’s being said or otherwise edit themselves, due to these types of issues?  It’s going to be easier for your subject matter experts or SMEs to explain the process as it really is to a stranger without the awkwardness, or any judgmental looks from the leader.  The bottom line is that you want the SMEs to open up and share what the process actually is, not what they hope it to be or even mandated it to be through failed change initiatives.  When we hear the real truth, then we can capture those as improvement opportunities, or golden nuggets.  Nuggets like “well, management doesn’t like it when we print the invoice early, but we need to do it to know what order we can pull early,” or “when verifying an applicant, I often ask my teammates for help instead of using the help guide because it’s actual garbage,” or “no one actually does the dock inspections nightly since because we have always done things this way.”

            We also need neutrality for the simple reason that the leaders may feel that this process is their baby and they may not want their subordinates calling it ugly.  They may want to sugar-coat the situation because of pride.

            Also, on a sensitive note, depending on how well the process owner is doing leading this group, you may not want them eliciting this.  If they are not succeeding as a leader, you really ought to consider taking them out of this effort, because they may be incentivized to put their finger on the scale to save their neck.  In order to improve processes, we can only accept honesty in the situation.  

            A third party can also bring the empathy to the discussion that a leader may not be willing or able to convey.  Again, I’m used to doing these efforts in troubled organizations, where internally led change initiatives haven’t delivered, or the operation may be a straight up dumpster fire.  Leaders may have come in blazing in an attempt to change behaviors and performance.  Leaders may have done retraining after retraining to no real effect.  (Here’s a free tip by the way: if your process improvement action item list consists only of retraining projects, you’re going to have a bad time.)  So in these sessions right now we don’t need that kind of heat and pressure.  We’ve already tried that and it didn’t work.  We want empowered experts to open up with their knowledge and ideas.  Professional process improvement leaders ought to be living the words of Deming who taught us to never blame the people, always blame the process.  I fully expect your pro to exude deep respect for the people who have been asked to execute on these poor processes, and that should come through in the session through empathy.  Your pro should be saying things like “wow, that’s amazing that the team is able to do all of this without a system to support” or “your teams are working really hard to get these orders out by the end of the day!”

4. Consistent and professional output

            A professional will have a better chance to produce for you a product that is consistent and professional.  This becomes important if you continue process mapping in other areas of the operation.  Now there’s certainly no guarantee of consistency.  In fact, if you have different professionals doing maps you will have differences.    But they will likely be closer to a standard than if you throw inexperienced people into the work.  Consistent and professional mapping is not only about driving the current project forward, but also setting the stage for mapping multiple processes, creating a process map repository, or even eventually migrating process maps into a business architecture system like iGrafx or ARIS.  

            If you are in a regulated environment, your regulators are going to want a product that suggests you know what you’re doing.  If it is inconsistent they may want to dig further into what’s going on, and no one wants that!  If you are considering migrating one or more processes into an automation system (like a workflow system for example), your implementation partners will need to consume multiple process maps to understand requirements.  It is far better that they are consistent and quality to save expensive remediation hours later.

            The bottom line is that, like everything else in life, if you spend money up front, you save money later, but if you cheap out up front, you’re going to pay more later. 

5. Quality elicitation

            The quality of your elicitation with a professional is going to be better.  Let’s define elicitation: “AI” says it is, quote, “the process of drawing forth or uncovering information, opinions, or emotions from a person or source.”  “Drawing out information” takes effort and skill!  Ever try to have a conversation with a teenager?  Yeah.

            The whole purpose of the process map is eliciting information from those who know, so sometimes it’s all about squeezing blood from potentially uncooperative rocks.  You need facilitators who are not threatening.  Bosses and supervisors or anyone else who can fire you are potentially threatening.  So, they are out.  A sizeable part of elicitation is capturing what people close to the process assume everyone already knows.  That takes a facilitator who can’t assume anything because they know nothing about the process.  They will ask the questions a subject matter expert would never ask, either because it’s a blind spot, or they don’t want to look foolish.  Real pros don’t mind looking foolish, because they know that dumb questions can reveal useful golden nuggets that will keep them employed.  An example from my past is asking processors what happens to the customer’s request for a checking account after it’s fulfilled.  Of course, people in fulfillment who spend their waking hours worrying about all the things that can go wrong in fulfillment are going to focus on just that, and will develop a natural blind spot in terms of what happens afterwards.  Turns out, very little happened after fulfillment, and that was a problem.  All their hard work for the customer ended up sent over to a third-party printing company who printed an extensive welcome packet that landed in a mail bin where it sat for an entire day.  So with respect to the customer’s end-to-end experience, the fulfillment executives wanted us to shave minutes off fulfillment cycle time just so the finished product could sit in a mail bin for a few more minutes!  It took an outsider with a wider perspective to ask the dumb question: “Ok, what happens after the last touch by the fulfillment processor?”  

            Now that I’ve portrayed professional process improvement facilitators as ignorant to the process in question and to some degree the business in question, let me also say that they also have an innate sense of processes that are good and not so good.  These pros know what questions to ask because they know where the opportunities tend to lay.  They have been around enough processes in enough organizations and industries to know where things are likely going wrong, and they can tactfully drill in and elicit really good information.  

            In retrospect, these opportunities will seem obvious, but believe me, when you have a roomful of people earnestly sharing what could be their life’s work you may not see these opportunities as obvious.  For example, when you identify manual handoffs of information, whether it’s email or paper, you have found a weak spot.  Also, handoffs across organizational silos are weak points.  Handoffs that are the proverbial “throw it over the wall” without any loop closure, communication, or affirmative “catching” are going to have errors.  Tasks that are complicated and manual are going to go wrong.  When finding these processes, it’s good to ask specifics about the steps in the process and find out how performance is measured.  Also ask for example artifacts so you can understand better what’s happening.

            Professionals you bring in ought to be familiar with the 8 types of waste.  This is Lean Six Sigma 101!  I’ve alluded to a few above, but let’s spell them all out.  These are the 8 types of waste.  There are a few acronyms to help remember them, but I like TRIMWOOD:

1.    Transportation – are you moving things and people around too much?

2.    Resources – are you wasting your talent or other inputs?

3.    Inventory – are you making or storing too much stuff?

4.    Motion – are people being forced to move around too much?  Think ergonomics.

5.    Waiting – is the work sitting too long?  It could be sitting on a dock or in an in-box.

6.    Overproduction – are we making more than what the customer needs?

7.    Overprocessing – are we doing more than what the customer needs?  

8.    Defects – are we producing junk that requires redoing or scrapping work?

Process improvement people, as I mentioned in episode two, need to develop an eye for waste, precisely because you can better dig into these opportunities during process mapping.  An example from my recent engagement was noting that when a customer arrives to look for slabs of marble and stone to purchase, the company must first select and move these items from storage to a display location.  Moving the items means moving other items to get to the items in question.  All this motion – not to mention the inherent chance that an item could be damaged in the move – means there is potential transportation and defect waste.  This is something worth looking into!  Can we show the items without moving them?  Can we expand our racking to support a more permanent display?  Can we get paid for all this work and the accompanying risk of damage?

Your experts also have seen what “good looks like” because they hopefully have improved a lot of processes!  Not every group of subject matter experts know what “good” looks like!  Here’s another example.  As a beginning beekeeper, I was taught that it was better to start the hobby with two hives instead of one.  Why?  One would think if you are inexperienced at something, you could do less damage to one hive versus two!  Turns out you want two hives so you can observe clearly when one hive is not doing well.  You need a frame of reference to sort out if a hive is in trouble.  You could say the same thing about your jalapeno pepper plant.  If you have two, you can tell which one is doing worse.  With one, you can’t tell - unless you’re experienced.  Your experts have seen a lot and their spidey senses will be tingling when they hear how things are going, and they also will not freak out, because they know it’s all fixable!

6.    Try out your process improvement expert

            Finally, hiring a pro to deliver a quality process map is a great way to try out your process improvement expert before engaging him or her deeper into projects.  A process map is a nice, discrete deliverable that stands alone.  A reader can quickly determine if it is a quality product or not, assuming of course everyone is level-set on what it was expected to deliver.  Not only can the project sponsor judge the quality, but the sponsor can judge the duration of time it took to deliver this, as well as the soft skills required to corral an unknown team enough to generate a great quality product.  How did the team respond to the task?  Were they all engaged?  Also, the map should come along with some insights from the pro.  I would ask a pro for a list of “golden nuggets,” or interesting insights into the people, process, and technology.  Identifying a great opportunity to reduce waste, risk, and cost or improve customer satisfaction and quality gives the pro an opportunity to demonstrate an ability beyond facilitation and working the Visio.  This is why a pro should always have a parking lot going in the room and should ask insightful questions that mine for some of these opportunities from the experts while keeping the team on task.  That can be a tricky balance!  Ultimately, if the team and the pro work well together, and you get a quality product that accompanies some insights, you can be very confident in engaging with the pro for more work.  This could be leading the team into the next steps, some of which could be leading a Kaizen project, leading the development of an A3 (which is a structured problem-solving process), leading an improvement project, or digging further into the process by doing a risk assessment called a FMEA.  Remember that gaining clarity of the process through mapping is just the first step to making real improvements that benefit customers, employees, and stakeholders!

      So there are the six reasons why you should hire a continuous improvement professional to do your process mapping.  By engaging an expert from outside the team, you will get a quicker cycle time on your process maps, you’ll reduce the workload on your vital leaders and subject matter experts.  You’ll get a better-quality product and experience through the neutrality and empathy that comes with a pro.  You’ll get a consistent and professional output on this bedrock deliverable on top of which many more improvement efforts will be launched.  Quality elicitation will get you more bang for the buck – less so the time and cost of your process improvement facilitator and more so with reducing the time spent by the business, who are no doubt trying to keep the wheels on the bus.  Finally, this deliverable is a great way to try out your process improvement professional before engaging them on more complicated tasks.

I hope this has been helpful, both for process owners who are looking for help, as well as for process improvement consultants who are looking for better ways to sell their services.  Hopefully a few of these bullets make it into your pitch deck!

      Thanks so much for joining me again.  Please check out DutchCedar.com for more information on me, my thoughts on process improvement, and my services!

      Please share this podcast with your fellow continuous improvement experts.  And please keep improving our work, onward and upward.