Why I would always map the existing process in discovery
A few weeks ago(now months when I actually finish this post) there was a really interesting discussion on Twitter prompted by Ben Holliday, it is such a strange situation where I both agree and fundamentally disagree at the same time. There are some assumptions in the discussion that for me are not my experience at all. I want to try and explain why. This post is focussing on a lot of Public Sector use cases but the approach works for any industry or businesses where you are looking to deliver process improvements.
It’s a question of value
A discovery happens because an organization is looking to improve the value chain. They are looking to change and improve services to deliver more value for the customer and the business.
Generally, we are trying to do one or more of these types of things:
- Enabling greater efficiency and less resource waste
- Enabling better business decisions
- Enabling new idea generation
- Enabling faster commercial growth
- Enabling improved customer service
The aims of discovery are as follows:
Before you commit to building a service, you need to understand the problem that needs to be solved.
That means learning about:
- your users and what they’re trying to achieve
- any constraints you’d face making changes to how the service is run – for example, because of technology or legislation
- the underlying policy intent you’ve been set up to address – this is the thing that government wants to change or make happen
- opportunities to improve things – by sharing data with other teams, for example
The current process is an integral part of gaining an understanding of why. Business process mapping helps you discover what is going on right now and why and as such I cannot see how you would run a discovery without understanding the current process through a process discovery exercise. The discovery process is focused on user needs and user research and I believe that can be done more effectively when understanding why the current user experience is what it is.
Why map the current process in discovery?
Understanding constraints
The Government Digital Service itself highlights the importance of understanding the constraints and highlights 4 specific examples (see below). All of these would be explored and understood in an effective process mapping workshop.
You’ll also need to understand any constraints you’re likely to come up against if you were to move on to the alpha phase. This includes constraints due to things like:
- legislation
- contracts
- legacy technology
- existing processes and systems
If you look at any generic service/process, I would argue your process has the biggest impact on the current user experience ahead of all the other factors. If discovery is about understanding the problem then you must look at understanding the As-Is process through a process discovery workshop. If you do this right you will understand all the other factors and how they impact the service delivery and as such is one of the critical discovery activities. If there is an existing process I would always want to understand it first. The knowledge this gives you helps inform the wider service design process.
Processes are complex and customer demand moves through many a process step, multiples systems, departments, team members, and priorities before a service is delivered or not. If you do not understand this during discovery when would you do it? This directly impacts on the current user perspective. Why would you not want to do this step when it should only take a couple of days maximum. An added bonus of the process mapping (process discovery) workshop is to engage all stakeholders from across the end to end process in understanding the current delivery and upcoming change.
Let’s not forget that the discovery team is ultimately trying to deliver business process improvement. If we want to improve what we do we are ultimately going to be deploying some sort of process optimization or new service(process) design.
As this is a strategic process I tried to express it via a Wardley Map I am a total novice at this so be kind (but have met Simon and had the pleasure of hosting a webinar with him) (access it here)
The narrative is what’s important with a Wardley Map so I provide my thinking below the image.
If anyone wants to use the tool I used to do the Wardley Map sign up free here many thanks Rainmaker for the brilliant free tool.
- Service Access – From a broad perspective a generic value chain for your services starts with a customer, citizen, patient, client, or any other service user needing to access a service, product, or information from you.
- Business Process – I would argue the thing that is most visible to your users is your custom-built business process. The user journey is intrinsically linked with the whole process as at each step the process is defining the dynamic steps ‘necessary’ to deliver the user needs. The business process defines every step of this process from the digital right through to delivery.
- Systems – There could sometimes be an argument that in some channels the systems could be more visible to the user than the current state process but this is mainly only the digital space and fundamentally overall I feel that the real work is impacted more by process than systems. The systems sit in the product area in the diagram but there may be some custom-built applications deployed in your business operations.
- Next in the value chain is Business Rules. It does seem silly to have business processes and business rules as separate entities as it is easy to make the assumption they are aligned. In our experience that is not always the case, there are many reasons for this but a critical one we see regularly is how we often optimize processes in organizational silos. If we do not see the full picture of the end to end process it is hugely likely we do not have an accurate picture of the alignment of each change and that it will have a positive overall impact and take us in the right strategic direction. Business rules are again custom-built in terms of evolution.
- Following this is Legislation. The legislation is set by the government and not easy to change I have placed this further down the visible value chain as it is less visible to the users although can become very visual to users at various points in the real-life processes. In many a use case, the discovery map will show that legislation has very little visible impact. The legislation is in the product evolution space.
- Next up comes people. By this, we are talking about having the people to fulfill the process itself. We have put this in product as temporary or permanent people can be acquired from the market. With Robotic Process Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and integration of systems, the reliance on manual process inputs is reducing over time.
- Resources come next in the visual representation of the value chain. Here we are talking about the physical resources to deliver the products or services like inventory or delivery vehicles. Again this is put in the product area of evolution.
- Finally, we have finance. This is rare for this to become visible to users during the process, and again we have put this in product due to the way finances are generally managed with clearly defined rules and regulations.
If an existing process is in place I would always want to capture and understand the process first and it doesn’t take much effort. It is a great way to capture a shared visual design (process diagram) for the current process with stakeholders from the entire value chain. The mapping process itself helps you gain real user insights and process intelligence. This helps to gain an understanding of why the user experience is what it currently is and will give you an accurate view of the starting point. For me running a process discovery in no way is constraining you to a predetermined solution.
If anything the process mapping exercise should in fact give you a great opportunity to engage your business users in your design principles and the discovery techniques you will be using in the discovery phase. So for me, your existing process is critical to users and your business process management. It helps you to identify problem areas, existing ideas, team members, data collection, technical details, and important issues.
There are often implicit assumptions about the way our processes work but we regularly find blind spots and incorrect assumptions when undertaking process analysis initiatives at the right level of detail. A manager’s eye view of the service will often differ from the reality of what an accurate process map will help you to understand about the variations, cycle time, documents, systems, roles, actions, and user experiences of the entire process.
10 reasons to map the existing process in discovery
- To get everyone on the same page about how the process currently operates
- To engage all process actors in understanding the current process and the purpose of this intervention
- To understand the times and costs relating to the delivery of that process or service
- To understand why the current process performs the way it does
- To understand problems and ideas for improvement related to the service
- To understand where customer value is being delivered
- Understand who is involved in the process and what systems/resources are being used
- Understand legislative and business rules and how they relate to the delivery
- Find bottlenecks and waste in the process
- To generate ideas or hypotheses to test with users
- To engage everyone involved in the change or improvement
- I will find some things I can fix right now and make the process better for customers
- I have a documented and understood map of the process that has been co-designed and owned by the people currently delivering the process.
All of this does not need to take a lot of time. On average in a 1 day workshop you can get all of this for most processes. Is this information useful to know as part of any discovery?
Why do people not see value in mapping processes?
There are some common reasons I see and coming out from that Twitter thread- Process mapping takes a long time/I don’t see much benefit from the outputs produced after process mapping.
- By mapping processes, we constrain ourselves to just improving and not innovating with things like service design or new business models
- We should be doing service design, not business analysis or continuous improvement
- It’s not discovery if we are mapping the current business process
Process mapping takes a long time/I don’t see much benefit from the outputs produced after process mapping.
I agree with this statement and understand where it comes from but I have a slightly different perspective. The problems with process mapping relate more to whether you are getting value from your individual approach to process mapping. If you get the benefits above in a day then you probably see the value if you don’t then you may well start to question the value. As an example (all too common) I have seen mapping a service take 6 months elapsed time and the outputs are nowhere near those in the list above. Strangely the next steps of the project did not go well and significant rework was required costing time and money. The primary driver for this problem is some of the tools and approaches we use to map and share/collaborate on our processes. Focussing on the tools there are many challenges to their functionality and use.- For a start, most of the options require a lot of skills to get the most out, and therefore trained analysts or designers. The tools are not suitable for normal business users
- There are no standards in the tools generally so one person’s output looks different from another which really doesn’t help users.
- There is data collected in multiple ways and all need to be collated, transferred and managed.
- Understanding costs and times sometimes doesn’t happen and if it does it is a complex manual calculation.
- Getting buy-in and ownership of the outputs is difficult.
- Sharing and collaborating on processes with process actors and stakeholders is hard to do.
- It can take a long time to do process mapping which adds value and require many different tools.
By mapping processes, we constrain ourselves to just improving and not innovating with things like service design or new business models
This is a little linked to the next point too. I don’t believe this at all if your approach is right to delivering improvement and innovation. In my workshops, I will always explain the purpose of the intervention and the process we will take from here. Making it clear what we are doing sets those constraints out clearly. I do not see that improvement gets in the way of innovation like service design. In the organizations we work with that are doing this well, improvement supports innovation by objectively identifying opportunities for radical design. I don’t want to be too challenging to people here but business analysts or continuous improvement people do undertake service design and service designers also do process/continuous improvement. Having worked a lot in smaller organizations in the public sector, we do not always have the luxury of all of the distinct roles we might like. Here in the process discovery piece of work, we are not identifying solutions we are just understanding from the users how the process works and why. We are looking to identify challenges not specify solutions. What I would choose to do next depends on what we find. It may be service design and/or improvement or maybe nothing! This does not have to constrain us unless we chose to let it. I definitely come from the Simon Wardley school when it comes to approaches and methods. There are many different tools we deploy to deliver change and improvement, and the right one depends on the challenge we have to address. It is quite old so doesn’t include service design but you get the point. I also would add they all need to work together to add value and join up in delivery.We should be doing service design, not business analysis or continuous improvement
This is linked with the above point but a slightly different track. Ben obviously gets involved in lots of big important service design projects and my paradigm is different as I get involved in a broad range of improvement and innovation projects. The likelihood(or at least best practice) is that with those big service design projects a level of understanding of the service is already done. To go to procurement you would need a lot of information to support that. In projects I have been involved in I rarely find that there is a good, documented, current, or up to date understanding of the current process. So with a lot of projects, we do need to do process discovery to work out what are the right tools to apply. Then and only then can we decide which tools to apply to the job. Business process mapping is a tool to support all of the other tools and help you to answer some of the questions. Given the above and the fact that all processes need to change (improve) many times in a year as part of business as usual it is safer to map and understand a process first and use the learning to inform where you go from there. There are far fewer service design projects than there are process changes a year. In my head, this makes sense but not sure I have articulated it well.It’s not discovery if we are mapping the current business process
I don’t think this is correct based on the GDS approach or any other approaches I have studied. I have asked quite a few people I respect in the field of improvement and innovation and almost universally they agree with my thoughts that understanding the current process is a pre-requisite of innovation. They work hand in hand to deliver more effective business change.What is the value in mapping business processes?
I have already detailed thirteen benefits I get from business process mapping in discovery so I will add a final one to avoid bad luck. Mapping your current process gives you a shared understanding of what is happening and why. It is an opportunity to engage those involved in delivering it contribute to improvement. It gives you an objective baseline to measure future changes against to be able to articulate and quantify the benefits of change in both cost and time.I would always see this as useful and valuable as part of my project whatever framework I am using. The biggest challenge people have in projects is quantifying the benefits of change. I say the biggest challenge as so many people have it and the impact of not knowing this is huge. Being able to have objective measures for the options helps make decisions far easier. It is not possible to know the outcomes but it is possible (and even easier and faster than what you do now) to have objective measures of the potential benefits of change to help facilitate decision making.
We need to apply a scientific approach to understanding our complex processes and to be able to demonstrate the benefits of process changes. Process maps only take you so far and most process mapping software is effectively a drawing tool and often does not capture the activity/tasks and level of detail to enable managers to decide what the new workflow scope should be and the benefits of change.
This does not remove or replace elements of service design the information you gain from such a small piece of work can enhance and augment your service design efforts (or agile or any other approach) as well as supporting continuous improvement in your organizations.
If you are interested in knowing more about effective process mapping (actually process modeling) or a free trial let’s have a quick chat or just get in touch via our form and we will get right back to you.
Here about what the City of Edinburgh Council think and have achieved with continuous improvements here
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