How do The Process Approach, The Process Library and The Process Map relate to each other and what benefits can they bring to your business or organisation?
Imagine you have arrived in London for the first time, and you need to travel from one tube station to another; but the tube map has not been invented! What would you do?
Well, you would almost certainly ask for help.
“Can you please tell me how I get from this station to my target station?”
Perhaps you would ask a passing stranger who appears to know where they are going. Or maybe a member of the underground staff? Or perhaps you would try to consult the internet. Depending on who you ask, what their mood is and the depth of their knowledge and their experience, you might receive useful advice, or you might receive the opposite. Then you would do your best to assess the quality of the advice you have received, and you would make a plan and set out on your journey, not really knowing if you will get to your destination or not.
Incredibly, this is how many businesses and organisations get things done…
Every day, in businesses and organisations in every country across the world, literally millions of questions are raised of the form:
“Can you please advise me how to best accomplish my task?”.
Millions of times per day. And for every time that question is asked, what proportion of the answers might be considered useless or downright unhelpful?
Fortunately, on the London Tube, passengers do not need to rely on the vagaries of a stranger’s advice - which, however well intentioned, may be incorrect or misinterpreted. Instead, we have that most wonderful of inventions, the Tube Map. This marvel of innovation shows in one picture how to get from station A to station B.
The Process Map is an equivalent to the Tube Map but in a business context. Instead of showing how to get from A to B, it shows how to achieve an outcome or produce a result or how to get something done. A diagram that shows the process flow in your organisation, across its organisational boundaries, and how your organisation transforms its inputs to its outputs, the Process Map answers the “how do I?” question clearly, rigorously and most importantly consistently.
A Process Library is a collection of Process Maps, together with all the supporting documentation, forms, policies and procedures that ensure your employees have all the resources they need to accomplish their tasks as efficiently and effectively as possible.
The content of a Process Library is made available to authorised employees direct to their desktop or mobile device via a browser – no software to install, and security managed via SSO so no passwords to remember. Updates to the content of a Process Library are therefore available to all, instantly, 24/7.
The Process Approach is a systematic, step-by-step business method and leadership philosophy that enables your organisation to produce outcomes as efficiently and effectively as possible.
One of the many tools that can be used in organisations that implement the Process Approach is a Process Library.
When a business adopts the Process Approach, one of the things it is trying to accomplish is to produce a reference source, similar in power and strength to the London Tube Map. It is trying to reduce the variability in performance that arises from all those daily questions “how do I…?” and the inevitable inconsistency in quality of response. It is trying to enable its staff to perform their roles as consistently, efficiently and effectively as possible.
We never really stop to think how many passenger journeys go well because of the London Tube Map; how many travel queries have been answered without ever even needing to have been raised or how many disrupted or inefficient trips across London have been avoided. Since the Tube Map was invented, how many passenger miles have been travelled optimally one wonders, and what are the monetary and time savings that have been made as a result? And now multiply that to all the metro systems across the world…
How many businesses and organisations by contrast operate without their Tube Map? And what are the potential cost and time savings if they were to do so? How much improvement could be made to customer satisfaction by the simple ability to perform tasks more consistently and deliver products with less variability?
The Process Approach may not be right for every business or organisation. The argument sometimes raised against it essentially boils down to the perception that the corporate effort needed to implement the method is too great for the return. That is a judgement call made by the leadership of the organisation.
In those organisations however where the leadership judge the return to be greater than the cost, then the investment made in the Process Approach can pay back handsomely.
This is the first of a series of articles which explore specific examples of how investment in the Process Approach can yield compounding returns over many years and the mission critical steps your organisation needs to take to generate these returns.To receive an email notification as each of the articles in the series are released, sign up here.
BMS: Business Management Systems – the Benefits of a Process Approach
How a Process Library Can Solve Business Efficiency Problems
What is a Process? And who Cares Anyway?
The 3 ‘U’s of Great Process Libraries