What is a process map and how can it save your company?

[jrineakter]

“We already have process documentation. It’s in a Google Doc or PDF somewhere.”

Experienced managers have heard this phrase more than once. It usually follows a question about why no one in a certain department can draw up a visual map of their core processes. This type of question often worries managers and confuses middle managers. Obviously the processes exist – the department does its job every day – so where’s the problem?

Processes hold your company together
Leaders lead, sales reps sell, salespeople promote, service reps deliver services, and processes hold the whole mess together. Smaller companies are inherently less dependent on processes, but as a company grows and becomes a more complex system, processes become absolutely critical to scaling. Very, very few companies can function effectively if everyone is reinventing the wheel every day.

What is a process? From a semantic standpoint, it is a repeatable series of standardized actions that a person or team performs to consistently achieve a goal. From a business theory standpoint, it is an intangible concept that somehow holds together hundreds of moving parts within a machine that would otherwise collapse into a smoldering pile of scrap.

Let's focus on the word "intangible." Because processes themselves can take so many forms—and because they often exist entirely in our minds—many professionals underestimate how different the same process can appear in the imaginations of two people in the same department. When processes exist primarily in this way—inside the minds of those who practice them, often referred to as "tribal knowledge"—problems arise.

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A small gap in the process can cost you dearly
Process intangibility manifests itself oman telegram data in very different ways. Sometimes the way people imagine processes to work and the way they are actually supposed to work (or should work) are minimal: think of two employees on the same team independently (and redundantly) tracking the same data point, or intervening twice at a customer touchpoint.

On the other hand, sometimes the gap between individual perception and institutional intent is huge: think of terminological confusion leading to systemic accounting errors, or important components of a new software product being overlooked due to haphazard project management.

Real Life Example: Customer Transfer
Even small gaps can cost you dearly. Consider the two people from the previous section, who work in the same department. Suppose they are part of the service delivery team and are positioned in the process such that one of them is constantly passing the service baton to the other. At the time of the handoff, one employee—let’s call him John—sends an email to the client and copies another employee—let’s call her Mary—on the email thread. Handoff done. The process has been followed.

But wait. For years, John has been regularly receiving responses to that email from clients who don’t include Mary in the thread. It’s the difference between clicking Reply and Reply All on an email, which isn’t too uncommon. John is a hard worker and takes pride in responding quickly to client questions, so he often handles these emails himself. Sometimes he copies Mary if he thinks the content might be relevant to his workflow.

Maria, however, assumes that John has been copying her on every client email he receives in which she has been removed from the thread. She appreciates that John understands the need to do so, because these emails often contain questions that John does not have the knowledge to answer accurately. She finds it a little odd that he tries to provide answers when she brings him back into these email threads, but his responses are almost always harmless, and Maria simply fills in the correct information and continues to move the client along in the process.