What is process mapping?
The short answer is that it’s exactly what it sounds like — a visual representation of how work happens, often in the form of a process flowchart or value stream map.
It’s helpful for bringing visibility to the individual components of an existing process or workflow, and can help guide basic decision making for core processes, such as in the example below. Most process maps make use of a common language made up of symbols that everyone in the organization can easily understand.
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Now for the longer answer on what process mapping is: Although a helpful starting point for process improvement, for most businesses, it’s also a pretty time-consuming and labor-intensive exercise that yields limited results compared to the amount of effort put in. For example, interviews with process owners, managers and other stakeholders are required to get a better understanding of the steps or tasks involved in each process. The outputs of those interviews then get translated into whiteboards and sticky notes (or the digital equivalent of sticky notes…which isn’t much faster).
Even if those initial steps go smoothly, they come with the significant caveat that the opinions gathered at the interview stage may be biased, incomplete or incorrect, and the processes mapped to them will only represent snapshots of reality, rather than what’s unfolding in real time. Plus, by the time the last sticky note hits the wall, an entire process may have changed, given the entire exercise can take months.
After that, there’s the challenge of identifying the pain points within a process map (which, given the above caveats, might not even be an accurate representation of how work is happening), followed by a reordering or replacing of individual tasks or process steps, and finally, a whole new round of map drawing.
Fortunately, business process mapping has evolved somewhat in recent years, allowing for integrations between process mapping software and business process management systems, but this still leaves businesses in a position where they have to manage their complex processes across fragmented technologies, while relying on potentially misleading or incorrect information.