Most organizations grow organically. They’re founded by a person or people who believe they can do something better than what the market currently offers. Naturally, those people may carry over learnings from their education and work experience, perpetuating systems or processes that may be dated or flawed to begin with.
As the business grows and responsibilities and tasks are divided up among more staff, the existing processes become more and more ingrained in the company’s culture. Each new hire is trained as quickly as possible on “The way things are done around here”. In their first few months on the job, these new team members rarely feel comfortable or capable enough to suggest improvements. By the time they’re fully onboarded and up-to-speed, they encounter the next big obstacle—the time-crunch.
Busy people want to get their work done quickly…this creates little incentive to step back and evaluate inefficiencies in current processes
Busy people want to get their work done quickly and efficiently so they can be ready for the next challenge, which is likely already waiting for them. This creates little incentive to step back and evaluate inefficiencies in current processes, let alone worry about how a process came to be in the first place. Suddenly, your business is caught in a state of inertia.
Innovation-oriented companies are particularly susceptible to this trap because they believe the nature of their culture will simply enable solutions to happen organically. But the heavy lifting of building a solution that works for all stakeholders in the face of their existing workload leaves many great initiatives to wither and die.
By mapping the process, an explicit and uniform view of the system and the weaknesses tied to it becomes visible
As your company grows from adolescent to adult, processes begin to evolve without any real guidance or intent. For example, Customer Service often starts with one person—usually the founder—manning a single email address. This makes sense when resources are at a premium and the insights from a small customer base can be used to immediately inform the product. As the customer base increases, the single email address may be handled by multiple staff members who are more concerned with response time than customer insight. Soon, those product ideas and customer insights are getting filed away or worse, not recorded at all. This may work for a time, but as the business continues to grow, the process becomes increasingly inefficient at serving the customer and the business. By mapping the process, an explicit and uniform view of the system and the weaknesses tied to it becomes visible to all stakeholders. This makes a collaborative solution far easier to identify and implement.
Business Process Mapping should be an iterative and inclusive process where the team doesn’t feel the need to justify or defend their current behaviours, but instead focuses on improvements moving forward.
Early on, mapping should be led by an impartial facilitator, preferably someone outside of the business. This facilitator should be able to build a map quickly and easily so the stakeholders can see the process come to life. They should also be far enough removed from the process to provide an objective view and ask logical questions unrelated to any power structures or legacy systems that the team may unconsciously be following.
The map creates a foundation for change
As the stakeholders involved in each process are interviewed, the map begins to take shape in greater detail. Weaknesses and redundancies will become evident, and often stakeholders will learn about elements of the process they weren’t even aware of. The map creates a foundation for change. Once the team understands the processes clearly and equally, work can begin on improving effectiveness and efficiency.
Mapping a process is not technically difficult, but asking the right questions and laying the process out in a concise manner can be a slow, challenging experience for the uninitiated. Most important though, is to create the space for the mapping to occur.
Connect with BeachHead
At BeachHead, we are passionate about helping businesses scale up from a strong Operations foundation. The BeachHead Organization Audit (BOA) helps founders evaluate their business through an objective lens. Our BOA scorecard allows us to evaluate all aspects of a growing business so we can recommend changes based on what the organization wants to accomplish in the next phase of growth.
If you’re ready to take your company to the next level, reach out and let’s start a conversation.
Email: rdrynan@beachheadstrategic.com
Phone: 416.888-4004
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