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Why BPMN May Not Work For Your Process Mapping Needs

21 Aug 2023 - Anna Roebuck - Blog

Using BPMN or considering using BPMN for process mapping but not sold yet?

We understand.

Business Process Modelling Notation is a fantastic tool for process maps, but it does have its downsides.

In this article, we’ll go over three main reasons why it may not work for your particular needs.

Let’s get started.

Need To Be an Expert

The first problem with BPMN is that you need to be an expert.

To make it, to update it, to understand it – any map with BPMN requires an expert’s touch and knowledge to do anything with it.

What do we mean by an expert? Well, there’s a PDF of 538 pages and certifications by an over-arching entity involved.

While BPMN was initially created to provide business analysts and businesses help and focus when mapping processes, this ultimately becomes a problem when you need all employees and stakeholders to be able to understand it as well.

The creators of BPMN understood that flowcharts or swim lane diagrams were not enough on their own to avoid confusion. BPMN was created to have specific notation for specific meaning within similar diagrams and charts, getting rid of any possible miscommunication.

But some might say it has gone a bit too far the other way and ended up becoming overly complex.

Because at the end of the day, a process map or chart needs to be simply and easily understood by all levels of an organisation. It’s only with an easily understood process map that employees can contribute and understand their contribution to the company as a whole. When they understand it, they can help you spot flaws or areas for improvement and even suggest fixes themselves.

But, if the process map requires a lot of additional knowledge to be understood, not only will they be unable to follow along, they may be unable to then impart this knowledge to new workers, leading processes to actually change without you knowing.

Making it too complicated for everyone involved will only overcomplicate things. Which leads us to our next point.

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BPMN Workshops Take Too Long

Because BPMN is such a complex notation, workshops and the follow ups take quite a long time.

You need to make sure everyone understands your map, then have everyone agree to demonstrate the process in a particular way, and then replicate this over and over each time. It is impossible to “map at the speed of conversation”, something you can do with a tool such as Skore which is based on Universal Process Notation instead.

In a BPMN workshop, you need to constantly take notes, then go back and input the changes into a process after a workshop. You have to remember and replicate the context of conversations for this to be achieved. Naturally, things will be missed.

After all, while BPMN was created to be as specific as possible and provide anyone mapping processes with many options, it results in a risk of interpretational differences if someone is not a BPMN expert. The different shapes and their meanings actually end up resulting in less standardisation instead, as processes affect every member of a company, and different team members may understand them differently if they don’t have the tools or prior knowledge.

Plus, BPMN working in this way means it is impossible to get a sign-off from a stakeholder during a workshop. Everyone needs to go back and digest what was discussed, and then be sent the new process. You’ll find yourself chasing after stakeholders and relevant Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for weeks to come to an agreement, and may in fact find yourself being sent back to the drawing board instead.

This means you are missing out on precious time to make the necessary changes to your processes, and thus losing out on all the improvements that those changes would bring about. Companies that use BPMN may thus find their success to be slower than competitors who do not, and who are able to adapt faster and make the necessary changes quickly.

Cannot Include All Eventualities and Necessary Data

Finally, for all the complexity of BPMN, these maps cannot include or account for all eventualities and the necessary data. And if someone does try to include it, they results in incredibly large maps with too much real estate that are too complicated to read.

At Skore, we value simplicity in our process maps.

The cleaner and more straightforward a process map can be, the easier it is to read and follow along for all employees.

Our process maps offer the possibility of attaching relevant information and documentation, in the form of an external link library or attachments for certain tasks. Additionally, our tools makes it possible for team members to leave comments or suggestions.

Unlike BPMN which can be daunting and not understandable if you do not have any prior knowledge, UPN makes it easy for anyone to see a process map and understand how it works. Thus, employees from any section of your organisation can contribute to their improvement, encouraging collaboration and engagement.

This is because UPN has few notations, and they are very direct. Skore focuses on answering simple process questions, mostly What? (the task) and Who? (done by a particular role).

You do not require additional certification or knowledge of many different symbols to easily understand a process map on Skore. And should you need further clarification or documentation to complete a task, it is possible to simply attach it.

You can even create a sub-process that results in that particular task but would be overcomplicated to show on the other process map. Instead, you can drill down into the sub-process that results in a particular task, and then return to the original process.

Trying to show that with BPMN would lead to a very complicated corner of a process map that would be quite challenging to decipher.

By having all of this information on the map itself, it also becomes a lot easier to run a workshop for improvement. You do not need to fetch any additional information, as all the documentation is on the map itself, and you can ask pertinent questions or find the bottlenecks quite easily during the workshop itself. Your stakeholders will be able to see it clearly as well, without the need for additional explanations as is required with BPMN.

Skore can also be used asynchronously, leading the comments or suggestions which can be made prior to a workshop or in tandem with it, or even after during a monthly check-in to review processes. This means anyone involved in a process can access all the relevant information and help find an improvement spot at any time.

Not something you’ll be able to do with BPMN.

Conclusion

Process mapping has become overcomplicated over time, and we want to change that.

After all, process mapping is meant to lead to continuous improvement and process reviewing, allowing your company to grow steadily and successfully, constantly adjusting to changes as needed. If you take too long to make those changes, it can cost you dearly.

With the right tool, you should be able to make those adjustments at a good pace for them to make the correct impact on your strategy. This means involving all employees in process improvement, as they are the ones that typically run them and know what may be taking too long or what needs to change.

To do that, they need to be able to understand a process map well enough and understand their contribution to the overall process. If they can’t do that, then they can’t help you find problem spots and troubleshoot them. They may even begin to feel quite indifferent to their overall role for your company if it’s not clear to them what their impact is.

You run that risk if you use BPMN.

While it does help you be incredibly specific, it does alienate anyone who cannot understand it. This means employees and stakeholders will take time to understand, time that as a business you might want to use in other areas.

If you’d like to learn more about BPMN alternatives and why we use UPN, then get in touch.

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How to Use Process Management to Optimise Your Sales Operations

14 Aug 2023 - Anna Roebuck - BlogTagged Process Management

Sales operations have taken on a more robust form in recent years. With the arrival of inbound leads to complement your outbound work, and the larger connectivity of the world, sales operations have never been more complex.

Their management is the key to success and helping you avoid falling into pits such as overspending or overcomplicating your processes.

Let’s learn how to use process management to help optimise your business’ sales operations.

Clear Workflow & Passing Over of Tasks

It’s important to remember that sales operations are described as a funnel, one that process management helps you navigate. Sales operations are the processes through which your sales funnel works.

Your lead or prospect will start at the very top of the funnel, and it is the responsibility of different sales team members to move them along the funnel to become paying customers.

Sometimes, they may cross over with members from Marketing for certain leads. For instance, a lead that has expressed interest but stopped responding or informed that they did not currently have the budget may be moved to a newsletter to nurture them into becoming a customer later on.

Other times, members within the same team will pass the activities from one to the other. An easy example of this is a Sales Development Representative being the first responder to an inbound lead, but then orienting the lead to have a demo call with an Account Executive.

It’s a bit of a juggling act, and the minute a cog is slightly out of place, it’s very easy to lose out on a potential sale. Everyone on the team needs to know what the next step is for the various scenarios, and what information needs to be captured for the next individual stepping up to know.

Having your processes mapped and shared in some way is an absolute necessity in sales, and is typically part of the training cycle of any new salesperson. Often, they’ll refer back to such documentation in their first few months on the job. It’s one of the main reasons why we map processes in the first place – to keep this company knowledge accessible and to ensure that the processes are being followed correctly.

Without process management working correctly, your sales operations would be chaotic and confusing to your team members, resulting in an immeasurable amount of lost opportunities.

Having them streamlined via process mapping and process reviews is vital to help you optimise them and see success.

Sales Responsibility Matrix Reflected in the Process

We mentioned this briefly above, but different members of the team will have different responsibilities – even within the same team. Process management helps you parse through these responsibilities.

Your Sales Development Representative (SDR) is not doing the same as your Account Executive (AE). Sometimes, there are also SDR Managers who help organise SDRs and assign them their tasks, lead lists, or territories. Your AE’s also may have different tasks amongst themselves, as they’re typically divided by territory and different territories may require different actions.

An example is that sometimes an SDR can make an initial demo or qualifying call, in other cases, it may be passed right to the AE. Additionally, AEs are not as focused on new business as SDRs, but more on upselling and maintaining relationships with your existing portfolio. They may look for new business via referrals from happy clients, or simply focus on strengthening existing relationships.

You also have your C-Suite, whose tasks are generally either focused on organising and orchestrating the entire sales team, researching new opportunities or profiles to go after, coming up with strategies to try, and finding ways to optimise the current process.

It’s vital that everyone knows what task falls under the umbrella of what title. Your process management should reflect this as well, which means it’s best if the responsibility matrix, whether it’s RACI or RATSI, is reflected in the process itself.

Make clear what tasks fall under what title, and then assign the task to that title. Whenever there is confusion about whose task it is, it becomes easy to ascertain and follow up with any questions regarding status or outcomes.

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Avoid Overspending on Tools that Prevent Optimisation

A common feature of sales teams and sales operations is the need for different tools to make certain repetitive tasks easier to arrive at optimisation.

Finding leads, writing emails or scripts, making calls, sending large quantities of emails, organising your leads with their information – all of this can be segmented into different tools very easily.

But this may be detrimental to your bottom line and lead to more overspending that is not positively reflected in the revenue that comes back in.

Proper process management will help you narrow down on tools that are unnecessary or superfluous to your needs, and instead help you consolidate the number of tools you need by spotting duplication or spots where you’re spending too much.

Process management can help you find a singular sales tool that may take over several tasks. An example of this can be HubSpot, which works as a CRM, mass emailing tool, and calling tool – all in one. Another example is Amplemarket, which serves to automate sending emails, create sequences, make calls, connect to LinkedIn, and also find leads.

You can cut costs dramatically and also simplify your processes in one fell swoop via process management.

Find Improvement Spots to Optimise Sales Operations

Process management of your sales operations will help you find improvement spots to further optimise them.

We have a clear example above, with finding one tool that will help account for several aspects of the process and help you save costs. Anything that helps automate certain tasks and give time back to your sales team, such as follow-up automation or LinkedIn automations would fall in this category as well.

The more time your sales team has, the more time they can dedicate to tasks that truly need their input. Examples of this are crafting email copy, spending more time on calls and more time on research or social selling.

Additionally, you can find spots where time is being lost due to internal situations. A hand-off from an SDR to an AE that takes too long, missing documents making negotiations take longer for an AE and causing the deal to go south, creating a new, personalised pitch deck every time for a demo – these are all time-consuming and tasks that can be fixed and optimised.

Process management will also help you figure out how best to use your team’s talents – something which is especially important to keep in mind for sales operations.

You may have SDRs that demonstrate ease and success over the phone, whereas others can set meetings via email or social selling.

Certain AEs may be a better fit for a particular client profile, as they build their relationships patiently over time, allowing clients to trust them and then offer referrals. Others may be able to generate relationships quickly and get all the paperwork signed fast.

Proper process management from the C-Suite makes it possible to see these differences and assign clients, tasks, and territories correctly to the correct profile. It’s also vital when pairing SDRs with AEs to keep this in mind, as some partnerships may work better than others. And, whenever a promotion or other change happens, process management will help guide what that will look like, making it an important internal map.

Conclusion – Process Management for Sales Operations is a no brainer!

Put plainly, process management is absolutely instrumental for sales operations to be successful, and thus for your company to be successful.

Without process management, your sales team will have an incredibly hard time selling your product or service, resulting in less revenue and a problem for you.

Optimising your sales operations is not complex, and indeed should be a continuous practice – one that can continue thanks to process management.

If you’d like to learn more about process management and its uses, make sure to request access to our library of resources here at Skore.

Top 5 Reasons to Use Process Management Software for Service Improvement

26 Jul 2023 - Colin Claverie - BlogTagged Business Process Mapping, Service improvement

Businesses or organisations are always seeking to improve their process and in so doing, their overall service.

Process management and improvement will lead to service improvement, as the service becomes more efficient thanks to better processes.

And a great way to improve processes?

Using process management software that enriches your service improvement needs.

Here are 5 reasons why you should be using process management software for service improvement.

Knowledge Management: All Your Information in One Place

The first reason is knowledge management.

As we know, company knowledge can often be scattered in various departments or sub-departments. This separation of material causes a lot of problems.

Not only for training purposes when someone new is coming in and finding that the process maps last checked months ago do not match up at all with the reality, but also to avoid miscommunication and make process review a lot easier.

Having all the information and associated documents in one, singular place, accessible to all relevant team members, is a huge step forward. And is only possible by using software that makes it easy for everyone to access and understand how the processes work.

This way, you find out that teams in both accounting and customer service are wasting time filling out the same forms – and you can nip the problem in the bud. Everyone relevant to a particular document or process can have access avoiding such issues and ensuring everything is running smoothly and efficiently instead.

And it’s not all existing in old filing cabinets, dusty binders, that one Google sheet, or in the head of a team member that’s about to go on leave.

Process management software with access to process libraries makes it all so much easier.

Want to learn more?

Process Reviews Built In

Another feature of process management software is that your process review is built into the software itself, helping your service improve exponentially and speedily over time.

You don’t have to set a reminder or organise a workshop every other week, simply utilise your software’s process review component.

Software can remind you when it’s time to review your existing processes to find improvement spots. Your decision-making process will be quick and easy. With less discussion regarding changes to the budget, spending, resources, and allocation of funds, everyone is able to see the same pain points suggested on the software for improvement when reviewing processes.

You’ll stay on top of trends and adjust your business accordingly. No more procrastinating when it comes to reviewing your process or running that workshop, let software help guide you to the best changes for your processes with your team.

Avoid Miscommunication With Clear Responsibilities

Another important benefit of process management software for service improvement is the clarity of roles.

For example, Skore clarifies who is in charge of what task, and what their role entails. Creating a process or reviewing one makes it a lot easier to assign roles and check on the correct individuals whenever there is a doubt.

Miscommunication will be avoided if people take responsibility making the entire process flow a lot smoother. Software expressly built for process mapping and process management will also typically follow a model such as RATSI or RACI to help assign responsibilities.

This makes everything a lot more transparent and clear to all involved parties, from the those running the process to the stakeholders looking to understand how it would work. And those in charge of those steps can also understand why their involvement is required during certain points in the process.

Your process will instantly run more efficiently, avoiding any of the common bottleneck issues when responsibilities are unclear, and ensuring the wait times are shorter or for more specific reasons and not simply part of how “the process always is”.

Additionally, your process is then focused on roles and not individuals. Mark from Accounting could be unavailable at any time, or even leave the company. But the Associate Accountant role has certain duties and tasks associated, so you can ask someone else in a similar role or a role above them if you run into issues.

Assigning roles as standard when mapping processes and having a way to analyse and track them ensures that there is accountability. Often one of the greatest challenges when running a project is being able to push things forward. Once a stage in the process has a role assigned to it, it is clear to all who is responsible for getting sign-off and moving things forward.

It’s why in Skore, a central part of the process map is indicating and answering the question Who? Is in charge of what action. The clearer the role in charge is, the best for everyone.

Cost Management At Your Fingertips

With process management software, the Service Improvement goal of cost management has never been easier.

Let the software calculate it for you and prepare the business case for you, such as with Skore’s Quantify.

You simply input all the numerical data, and let the software run its options. It’ll provide you with expected revenue, how much of a difference it is from what you’re spending, and then what you should change to spend less. You can be sure that the calculations are available and correct for each process.

Quantify can even help you assess where the blocks are on your existing process, and then also explore different scenarios. You can then see how those changes will affect the year in a month, quarter, or year, allowing you to build your case for stakeholders to make the necessary changes.

In fact, Quantify will build the business case for you if needed.

Decision-making internally within teams and with stakeholders will become a breeze, using valid data to help speed things along significantly. Not only do you have the numbers to demonstrate your case but you can also delve into the detail easily when challenged.

And you don’t even have to make the calculations yourself!

Access the Process from Anywhere

Finally, process management software allows you to access your process maps and information from anywhere.

You no longer need to all physically be in a workshop once a month to work on it together. Software allows you to rely on a cloud-based system, so that your team can access your processes from anywhere, anytime.

This means team members can work asynchronously on process mapping or process reviews. You should find a software that allows you to leave comments and add information where relevant.

Additionally, because it can be accessed from anywhere, employees will be able to consult it anytime should they run into issues. This is useful during training periods, or any time they have a question. They can quickly determine the correct individuals to ask questions if necessary, or answer their own questions by looking at the process maps.

This also means you can easily update your processes whenever changes occur, keeping your processes relevant.

It also means reviewing the process can happen from anywhere, and with a tool such as Skore’s Quantify you can run it and try different solutions on your own before you share it with everyone else. This easy accessibility will help your processes run smoother and more efficiently.

Service Improvement means Healthy Processes!

Process management software exists to help your processes improve, and thus your service improves.

While we’ve gone over five reasons you should be using it, there are many more to consider. A key point to always remember is process management software is designed to help your business run smoothly.

You don’t need to patch together process maps and calculations on programs or options that don’t really work for your needs. Everything related to processes should be addressed and made easier and accessible for you in one, singular place.

Interested in learning more about process management software and service improvement?

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Cutting Costs With Continuous Improvement

26 Jul 2023 - Chris Green - BlogTagged Business Process Mapping, continuous improvement

One thing you want to do as a business is to be aware and purposeful with your spending.

Whatever you are spending your budget on, we all understand that if the organisation can’t see a return on investment then they are going to be looking to cut costs.

Your first step if this is the case should be to look firstly at how you can cut costs by making changes internally, your second step is to ensure that these efforts aren’t just a one-off. This is where continuous improvement comes in.

In this article, we’ll go over how it’s possible for companies to cut costs smartly by practicing continuous improvement.

Let’s start by exploring what we mean by cutting costs before we expand on continuous improvement and what steps you can take to get started.

What Does Cutting Costs Mean

Cutting costs in business means making the correct decisions to avoid overspending or spending on anything that leads to lean waste.

Overspending can show up in a variety of ways. Investing too much in a product and being left with additional inventory, work being duplicated, suppliers being paid for work that is not useful, or on tools that say they will help you run your sales cycle better and faster.

The tools or materials that are being used may end up costing you more in the long run. All of these cases can lead you down the rabbit hole of lean waste.

Lean waste refers to any step in your business process that does not provide value to the customer. Your customer has not paid for you to do this, so your doing it is really a financial loss to the company. If we think of it in terms of overspending, it means the supplier you are paying may be a costly decision that is no longer needed as you are not generating enough revenue to support it.

There are eight different kinds of waste that you will want to keep track of to help you cut costs. They are:

Transport – Anything that involves the movement of people, tools, inventory, equipment, or products farther than necessary is considered waste. As an example, consider sourcing materials needed for production nearer to the location of the factory where they are used. Adding travel time will only slow down the entire process.
Inventory – In terms of waste, we mean excess inventory. Having too many products that are not being sold can lead to defects, damaged materials, longer production processes, inefficient allocation of capital, and problems being hidden away in inventory. It makes it difficult to detect problems in production and leads to greater problems down the line as products have to be re-made to correct these defects, while the original ones sit as excess inventory taking up space. Examples of excess inventory can be anything from unused records to additional products, to older machines that are no longer used but are taking up space.
Motion – Motion is any unnecessary movement of people, equipment, or machinery. Any walking, lifting, bending, reaching, stretching, or moving that is required but does not serve the customer. Tasks that require too much motion need to be re-designed, not only for efficiency but also to increase health and safety levels in the work environment.
Waiting – Waiting is any moment in a business manufacturing process in which someone is waiting for another action to be completed in order for the process to continue. The mishandling of this dead space can have catastrophic results if it is not managed correctly, so shortening wait times are always of the utmost importance. Examples include customers waiting to receive their product, waiting to receive email responses or approval, and waiting on materials to arrive at a factory.
Overproduction – Overproduction is when a particular product is manufactured before it is asked for or required. It leads to excess inventory, higher storage costs, hidden defects, and higher costs overall as new products have to be made regardless. Some examples of overproduction include making extra copies, excessive reports that go unread, making more products than customers demand, or in higher batches.
Over-processing – This is when you overcomplicate your product or service, requiring the customer to complete more work, components, or steps. Examples of over-processing are utilisng higher quality equipment than necessary, running more analysis than needed, preparing more detailed reports than needed, and unnecessary steps in purchasing such as too many signatures on a document.
Defects – Whenever your product or service is not fit for use. This means reworking or scrapping it, which are not real solutions. After all, both add additional costs to your operation without delivering any value to the customer. There is no clear line between their purchase and the costs you take on in this case. An example is a product that is missing a part or that is the wrong colour.
Skills – This is the under-utilised skills and talent of your employees. It happens when organisations separate management from employees too strongly, resulting in a lack of knowledge and expertise from the frontline needed to improve processes. The way this plays out is usually a lack of training, poor incentives, not asking for feedback, or providing employees with the wrong tools for the job.

When we talk about cutting costs, we talk about taking actions that will directly affect one of these eight wastes. By doing so, you’ll make your business run smoother, leaner and it’ll be a lot more affordable.

But how to cut costs intentionally to see a real solution – by practicing continuous improvement. This is a long-term solution for your organisation.

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What Is Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement is a philosophy that calls for a constant, incremental improvement to your business processes leading to higher efficiency and thus greater success for your business.

By practicing continuous improvement, you are always in the know of what your company is doing and aware of where there may be spots you can improve on. Having this information available and handy is key for strategic decision-making, allowing you to adjust to new trends, new technology, or any disruptions that may happen.

As a philosophy, continuous improvement provides you with a set of tools and techniques you can use to best lead your company to success. It’s subdivided into four key components:

Involve everyone. A big component is the involvement of everyone in your workforce to think of ways to improve and monitor existing business processes. By involving them so directly, you also foster loyalty and a positive feedback loop can be established, as they can understand exactly how their work contributes to the business’s success, and thus their success too.
Continuous improvement culture. Establishing a culture of continuous improvement from the get-go will be entirely beneficial to your business. You don’t have to re-train people, simply make it part of their everyday tasks and they themselves will begin to think of ways that your existing processes can be fixed. This fosters communication and helps avoid issues such as the doubling of paperwork or tasks unnecessarily. It also helps keep responsibilities clear.
Map your processes. To find the areas of improvement, you need to have your processes mapped and as true to life as possible. Without these maps, you’re the blind leading the blind, and unlikely to see much improvement. Map your different processes, involve your team in doing so, and involve your team in reviewing them. Those troublesome bottleneck spots will be easy to find and solve by making the right fixes and changes.
Find the right tool. Finally, you want to find the right tool that helps you achieve continuous improvement in a way that is easy and sustainable for your business. For some, this means having their company knowledge spread out over several Google sheets and docs, for others it means making use of tools such as Visio or Nintex Promap. At Skore, we like to help companies centralise their knowledge and have everything accessible, from documentation to external information, in one location.

Remember, in continuous improvement, everyone is always wanting to identify and fix any business process inefficiencies.

An inefficiency that you will find is fixed over time as a result?

Overspending.

How Continuous Improvement Leads to Cutting Costs

Because you are constantly looking for inefficiencies in your business processes, it will be quite easy to find areas where you can cut costs. You want to maximise efficiency to run smoothly, and that involves improving your spending practices.

You may find that the manual tool that requires manual follow-ups to all leads is actually quite draining on your employee’s time and your wallet, so you switch that up for a more automated option instead.

Constantly checking on trouble spots also means you’re aware of how much is being spent in certain parts of the process. And if what you’re making from those deals does not match up with how much you are spending, you’ll know you need to start trimming the fat and find ways to spend less.

How to best practice continues improvement?

That’s where software such as Skore comes in.

You’ll have your collection of process maps in your shared process library, so that all involved employees can study the relevant processes constantly. On Skore, it’s possible to set up a monthly process review. Because you can also add all the relevant data, it’ll be quite quick to see how your processes are doing numerically and thus, easily compare revenue vs spending.

The minute the numbers are not adding up, you can start looking into why and trying different solutions on Quantify.

Unique to Skore, Quantify can help you identify the bottlenecks in your process that are resulting in hidden costs. It can help determine what you should change in your process, and it can help you predict what those changes will look like in a month, quarter, or even a year. Your decision-making will be a lot easier, and a lot quicker with the numerical data backing you up.

No more worrying about hidden costs.

Instead, easily cut costs by practicing continuous improvement using a tool such as Skore, that will keep this information safe and accessible to you in a process library you can re-visit any time.

Conclusion

Businesses need to take care of their bottom line if they are going to succeed.

This means keeping track not just of money coming in, but also of money going out.

And finding ways to minimise how much of that money is going out.

The best way to do so? As we saw, continuous improvement will lead to smart decision-making and changes that will help you cut costs while retaining your business’ efficiency.

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4 reasons you should use Process Hierarchy when mapping processes

05 Jul 2023 - Craig J Willis - BlogTagged Business Process Mapping, Process Improvement, Process Mapping Workshop

Do you understand the importance of process hierarchy and creating sub processes?

Mapping processes is a vital way of keeping your organisation healthy and ahead of the game. Any successful company should be doing it. But the method you use will make all the difference, changing this from a one off painful exercise to a way of working that brings instant and long term benefits for everyone.

You may have seen large 2 dimensional processes with tens, or even hundreds of steps included. They may have limited sub-processes, but most of the information is displayed in a single view. If printed out they span several pages carefully stuck together on the wall. Or if viewed on a computer screen they require both vertical and horizontal scrolling, constantly zooming in and out, to work out where in the process you are.

Some notations, such as UPN and IDEF0, have process hierarchy built in. It’s a natural part of the approach where processes are summarised at a high level and then individual steps are broken down into more and more detail. While this creates more diagrams it has a number of advantages making your process documentation more accessible to users, more effective for improvement, more efficient for stakeholders and much more connected across the organisation.

With modern software tools there’s really no need to keep creating large, complicated and difficult to use processes.

So here are 4 reasons why you should be using process hierarchy:

1. Process Hierarchy makes processes easier to read

Being able to summarise processes without losing the detail means that users can digest what’s on the page much faster. In many cases, individuals only need to understand a specific part of a process so being able to see the relevant part straight away makes life much easier.

What’s more, a summarised process is easier to display, in a readable format, on a single page or screen. Today, when we spend more time reading and consuming information on a computer screen, we are also limited to the size of that screen. So if you can fit a process on a standard computer screen, and make it readable, without zooming in and out of the text, it’s going to be easier to read.

With the right technology, users simply need to click through to see the next level of detail to get what they need and still understand the full context. Making it easier for them to read means you are going to have better engagement and collaboration from the people who really need to be accessing this information.

2. Process Hierarchy connects the right people to the right information faster

In addition to making processes easier to read, through breaking them down into digestible chunks, the process hierarchy means that colleagues only need to access the part of the process that’s relevant to them.

Clear Hierarchy in Process Software Platform

For example, executive management doesn’t need to know the details of how an invoice number is generated or who approves it. But they do need to know the key processes that deliver value to customers, the order they happen in and who owns them.

Similarly, a Finance Manager doesn’t need to know the individual line items on an invoice, but they do need to know the approval flow and the business rules that dictate who approves what.

The Finance Administrator needs to be very clear on how and when to create an invoice number and how to order the line items.

Each of these colleagues can enter the process hierarchy at the relevant level saving them time looking through large complicated flowcharts where only a small portion is relevant to them. This means your process map becomes a tool that can be presented to executive management for a high level overview and then drilled down into the detail when needed by any level of the organisation.

3. Process Hierarchy shows how key processes fit together

One of the most common problem areas, identified in process improvement projects, are handovers. Where information, or products, get handed over from one person, or team, to the next.

While we can try to reduce the number of handovers, across a whole organisation it’s impossible to eliminate them completely. Instead we need to know where the critical handovers happen and who owns each side of them. That way we can monitor and manage these interfaces.

Using process hierarchy to summarise all the processes into a single ‘Business on a Page’ view elevates this challenge to the executive level. All the organisation’s key processes can be displayed in one place, along with the key handovers.

This ‘architecture’ view of the organisation helps inform strategic conversations and aid decision making, especially when it comes to change and transformation.

What’s more, if the hierarchy is connected all the way down to the task level then senior management will have better insights into the impact of potential changes.

4. Process Hierarchy helps develop critical thinking

Mapping processes using hierarchy makes your efforts more effective because it forces stakeholders to think more critically about their processes. Simply describing a process step by step helps people to think about and challenge how it’s done.

But when stakeholders are also asked to summarise their process and then group low level activities together they go through a much deeper thought process.

It helps to reconcile different types of thinkers. Some people naturally think at a very high level while others think in detail. If your process document is only focused on detail then it’s harder for the high level thinkers to engage and follow and vice versa.

So collaboration becomes easier as you are able to use the hierarchy to address both needs and bring them together. Participants have more conversations about handovers as those handovers need to make sense at both the higher and lower levels. This forces teams to address issues that often go unnoticed and make decisions there and then.

Process hierarchy in UPN – choosing the right approach

Most standard process notations are designed to be flat 2 dimensional diagrams with all relevant information displayed in a single view. Notations such as BPMN allow for some sub-processes but these are generally limited in scope to include only activities carried out by the role, or system, associated with the parent box.

UPN, on the other hand, is designed with hierarchy as a key part. The intention is that processes can be summarised at a high level, then each step is deconstructed into more and more detail until the necessary information is captured.

Traditional tools for creating flowchart diagrams typically require the author to create multiple diagrams and manually link these together, which can be time consuming and prone to error and resource intensive maintenance over time. So when looking at building processes with hierarchy it’s important to find a tool that has this ability built in so that the software can manage the relationships between the parent and child diagrams in the hierarchy.

Conclusion

If you’re trying to influence change across the organisation and make a real impact with process improvement and process management then using process hierarchy is essential. It helps you create a holistic picture of all the processes in your organisation and how they connect.

But it’s just as important to select the right tool to help you. Not all process platforms support this type of mapping, or at least not easily. Notations such as UPN are hierarchical by nature so it’s best to choose a software that also supports hierarchy by default.

Doing so will help make your effort more effective, more efficient and more connected to the wider organisation.

If you’d like to explore this further please get in touch with a member of our team.

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Do’s and Don’t’s of Flowcharts for Process Management

26 Jun 2023 - Anna Roebuck - Blog - 1 Comment

Flowcharts are a great way to begin visualising a process.

They’re a familiar way of depicting events that anyone can follow along with.

That said, there are some aspects to keep in mind when adopting them for business processes and process management. In this blog we’ll run through these and share with you a free template to help you start mapping your processes today.

Let’s take a look and find out more.

Do Familiarise Yourself With a Business Process Flowchart

Firstly, you do want to familiarise yourself with what a business process flowchart looks like and how you’re expected to use it.

This may change depending on how the process maps were done previously at your company, or you may be coming up with your own version.

Ideally, whatever you use has some form of standardisation that can be replicated and understood to have the same meaning constantly.

A business process management flowchart is similar to other mapping options in that it helps you visualise what your business process actually looks like. By capturing your process, you can begin to improve on it and thus lead your business to greater growth.

This is why you want to know what a flowchart is and how it works.

Learn how to create a process, discover how to break it into simple steps and get a visual representation of our business by using our business on a page template.

Don’t Be Afraid to Use Flowcharts for Processes

Conversely, some people may be against the use of flowcharts for business.

As we’ll see in a minute, there are some limitations when it comes to using flowcharts for business process management.

But they are a great initial tool. If you’re in a quick meeting or having a phone call and you do not have access to anything other than pen and paper, sketching out a quick flowchart is a great way to quickly run through the process as it stands. Potentially add some changes you want to make and see what happens.

Simply because they have some limitations does not mean you should not be using them or avoiding them. A flowchart can do a lot in its simplicity.

Do Be Aware of the Limitations of Flowcharts for Process Management

So what are the limitations flowcharts have when it comes to business process management?

Firstly it’s the lack of roles per task. This creates difficulties when it comes to assigning responsibilities. If it’s not clear in the chart who is responsible for what, everything will be a lot slower than it needs to be, including your growth as a company.

Secondly, flowcharts cannot include all of the relevant information. If they do, it becomes challenging to read. You will always be sacrificing information when using a flowchart for process management, and your process optimisation may well suffer for it.

Thirdly, flowcharts depend on the notation of the one who makes them. Unless you arrive at an agreed-upon, internal notation, you may run into different people understanding the flowchart differently. Or different people mapping similar processes in very different ways. This will cause confusion during the actual process actions, and result in a lot of working backward to fix things, as is often the case in clinical trial management.

As a business, that is time you do not have. This leads to our next point:

Don’t Forget to Include All Parts of a Business Process

As we said above, using flowcharts is a great way to get started. During a quick call or elevator meeting, getting out a pen and paper and scribbling something out can be extremely useful.

There’s a reason they have been the selected tool for so long.

But flowcharts do not capture enough of the business process.

It’s missing crucial information such as forms, data, roles, and responsibilities. In some cases, entire sub-processes are not accounted for.

Flowcharts make it simple to capture a business process, but that’s because they only capture the minimum. To be able to truly understand and improve your processes, you cannot pick and choose which part of the process to study. You must be able to capture and visualise it in its entirety, and that is something a flowchart cannot do, whether it is digital or handmade.

Do Utilise the Right Tools for Process Management

When it comes to process management, you want to make sure you are utilising the right tools.

Sometimes it’s a flowchart, sometimes it’s not.

Often, you need a little more than a flowchart for business processes. The reason why Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) exists is because it was determined that flowcharts weren’t enough on their own. But a complicated notation system is not the answer either.

At Skore, we’ve developed a simple, easy-to-use tool for process management.

Our goal was to ensure everyone in a company can follow along, as everyone is involved with the business processes keeping it running and will have to be involved in process mapping at some point.

We wanted to create a tool that accounted for the limitations we saw elsewhere when it came to business processes. With Skore, roles are a component of any action, so that it is obvious under whose responsibility a certain task falls.

This helps clear up confusion and figure out why something may be running slower during a process review. It also helps those undergoing training: they can refer back to the process in the process library and ask the correct person.

Another aspect of Skore is that all relevant data is included. You can attach data sheets, forms, and other documentation as needed that is pertinent to any task. And it does not clutter the map itself, simply shows up as an attachment.

If there is a sub-process for a particular task, it is also possible to zoom in on that by simply clicking on the task itself and viewing the process map for the sub-process. No information is lost for the sake of clarity, allowing for a complete review of the process when it’s time to consider improvements.

Skore uses Universal Process Notation (UPN). An easily understood notation system in which there is no confusion, as the notation means the same throughout the entire platform and on any map made on it.

In addition to fixing problems, at Skore we took an extra step and realised the importance of data for process management. We developed Quantify to provide a dashboard of numerical data information and point out problem spots to consider when it’s time to improve a process.

Utilising Quantify, Skore users can calculate activity based costing, the impact of switching the responsible role, how expensive activities are, and more. They can try different changes on the process and explore the impact that change is expected to have in a month, quarter, or year, so they can make the correct decision based on the available data.

And, they can create reports to show stakeholders why a change makes sense, making sign-off happen a lot faster.

Discover areas for improvement in your business by downloading our business on a page template.

It’s easy to see why, then, you…

Don’t Rely Solely on a Flowchart for Process Management

The key takeaway?

Flowcharts are great, but not the only option you should consider when it comes to process management – especially business process management.

BPMN, Swim Lane Diagrams, UPN – these are all alternatives to flowcharts that can be used and applied instead.

Business process mapping software today already uses a lot of these in conjunction with flowcharts to make your life even easier.

That’s not to say flowcharts aren’t useful or have a function, simply that they are a component of a whole. As with most things, business process management works best when you are utilising several solutions to the problem at once. Or software like Skore, which already does it for you!

Conclusion

Flowcharts are a great tool: they provide an easy starting point to get from A to B.

But as a business grows and wants to improve, it becomes more complicated.

This is when a tool like Skore comes in and changes the game. We are here to make your business process management life simpler, and to take you beyond the flowchart while acknowledging its use.

Want to learn more about how different kinds of tools for process management?

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Process Management for Service Improvement

21 Jun 2023 - Craig J Willis - BlogTagged Process Improvement, Process Management, Service improvement

More prevalent in governmental or healthcare roles, service improvement as part of process improvement is a phrase we are coming across a lot more.

We work on it with clients, and we believe we can help them with it. Having a wealth of experience in this sector and an abundance of tips to share, in this article, we’ll go over all things service improvement, and how process management, our specialty, fits into it.

Ready?

What Is Service Improvement

At its core, service improvement is empowering staff to feel confident about taking on a wider range of tasks.

Service improvement covers:

Involving various teams with decision-making and training allowing staff to cover a wider range of tasks
Regular meetings between staff leaders and management teams
Talent mapping and training needs analysis (TNA) that are relevant to each department’s development plan
Development opportunities provided for all staff that meets their needs and requirements
The development of more specialised staff through TNA and an education programme to support all staff
Sharing knowledge with others
Engaging on the ground with partners
Motivating staff
Encouraging continuous quality improvement

Service improvement is often connected to service transformation, with improvement focusing on bettering what is already there and transformation focusing on making changes.

There are three phases to service improvement:

Discover and understand – you want to make sure you understand how things are currently working. Not just internally, but also taking into account any external factors that affect your service and its quality. To do this, you want to make sure that you can:
- Identify your service’s core purpose
- Know the demand for your service
- Know your capacity to deliver
- Understand customer flow in your service
Generate and develop ideas – once you understand how your service is currently working, you can begin to think of ideas to improve and transform it. Involve everyone that contributes to the service: they will not only know what is happening on the ground, but they will probably bring you a variety of ideas to improve it based on their experiences. With this, focused quantity and creativity are encouraged, as you can build off of ideas.
Implementation – having done the tests and found an idea that works, you can now implement those ideas on the ground. This in itself requires a process to make sure it is done correctly and there is no one missing out. You need to:
- Have a measurement plan in place to evaluate the implementation’s success
- Know what data you plan to collect to measure this success
- Have a clear communication system in the process and with your management
- Know who is responsible for what at all times

In all three phases of service improvement, there are three factors you always need to consider. They are:

Stakeholders – anyone from management to patients or citizens in the case of healthcare or government are stakeholders as they are the ones that need to understand and essentially have the change work for their improvement.
Measurements – as we saw above, it is necessary to know what the measurements currently are and what they are after implementation to truly know success has been achieved
Sustainability – finally, focus on the ability to maintain those improvements. It’s one thing to have a super involved individual, but you can’t solely rely on that happening in every location, or that the individual will stay. You want to develop processes that are self-sustaining and will last.

If done correctly, service improvement done well will lead to quality improvement, which the NHS defines as a “systematic approach to improving service quality, efficiency and morale – not just a mechanism to solve problems in failing parts of the organisation. It is a way of expanding improvement beyond organisational or functional boundaries, so that impact is possible across the wider health and social care system”.

Service Improvement vs Process Management vs Service Design

If you are at all familiar with process management, especially as it pertains to continuous improvement, this will all sound similar.

Service improvement focuses on helping a specific service be the best it can be at any point in time. It involves a lot of moving parts and tight control and awareness of how those parts make a better whole for the entire team.

Process management is the steps you take to get to that improvement. And while we typically focus on business process management, it can be applied to services as well. After all, the end goal in both cases is always continuous improvement.

This means both service improvement and process management require those in charge to constantly be on the lookout for things that can be improved. Anything from a task that is taking too long to doubling up on information is something to keep note of as unnecessary and negative to the entire process.

Service design, on the other hand, is the design of new services. Specifically, it is “the activity of planning and organising a business’s resources to directly improve the employee’s experience and indirectly improve the customer’s experience”.

The goal is to create a service that responds to your organisation’s needs, both internal and external, with processes in place that serve this purpose. One of the outcomes of service design is eventual service improvement.

For a quick refresher, take a look at the chart below:

Service Improvement	Process Management	Service Design
Arriving at an improvement of services offered by measuring data, working with stakeholders, empowering staff, and having good communication.	Managing the entirety of processes on a constant basis to ensure they run smoothly and you can find improvement spots.	Creation of a service in its entirety, keeping processes in mind to arrive at the end goal of continuous service improvement.

How Does Process Management Lead to Service Improvement

There should not be any doubt at this point that process management will absolutely lead to service improvement.

The phases described above are the same as those involved with continuous process improvement, and the end goal in all cases is the same.

They use Six Sigma and the 7 Lean Wastes. The NHS’ own Handbook on Service Improvement dedicates an entire section to process mapping – something we consider ourselves experts in here at Skore. While the industry may be different from a regular organisation, healthcare and government institutions both also require process management to be successful in achieving their service goals.

Good process management is the key to it.

Without a clear plan in place for process management, services fall apart and issues mount.

At Skore, we’ve recently begun working with clients in these areas, and we have discovered how much we can help them.

Our platform provides mapping services easy for everyone involved to follow, incorporates responsibilities from the get-go so there is no confusion, gives you the data points you need, points out improvement points based on that data, and provides you with the possibility to run examples before implementing anything and seeing how they may affect the overall service experience.

The best part?

It provides you with a case study for you to show stakeholders which drastically lowerswait times for decision-making as it is a data-first approach.

Conclusion

Service improvement is, at the end of the day, a natural outcome of process management.

So many organisations focus on service above all, and the quality of that service, as they serve their patients or customers.

But the skills required are essentially the same. Which means the tools can be used in both cases.

If you’d like to learn more about how Skore can provide you with everything you need to elevate your services, get in touch or join our resource community for more exclusive content like this.

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Business Process Training Game

21 Jun 2023 - Craig J Willis - Blog, News - 1 Comment

Training teams on the importance of business process mapping, and how to do it, can be daunting. Process mapping can be a dry topic and it may be a challenge to make it more interesting. But using a process training game not only engages people and is a powerful tool to get your point across effectively.

The Skore process improvement platform is all about making processes easy to understand and accessible for everyone in an organisation. However often, there is still a need to train people to understand the importance of business processes in the first place. In this blog we’d like to share a selection of games we regularly use to engage people in process training and design workshops. We hope you find them useful and would love to know how you get on with using them in the comments below.

A simple business process training game

To start with here is a simple process training game we’ve used in many training sessions in the past. It’s a very straightforward exercise that gets people out of their seats and thinking about basic process flows.

First provide a set of cards to the attendees that each describe individual steps in a predefined process. You can download a set of cards that describe a recruitment process below.

Some of the cards are activities – things that happen, and others are triggers or outputs. You can see in the recruitment process that we provide that it starts at the top left of the first page and flows left to right, top to bottom. Print and cut the cards out. Shuffle them and hand them to the group asking them to place the cards in the right order

simple process training game in action — Simple process training game in action

The trick is to get them to follow a simple methodology. They should start with defining the scope, where does the process start and where does it end. Our 5 steps to the Perfect Process guide will also help with this which you can download below.

Next they lay out all the activities. The activity cards are clearly described using a verb and noun. The group should lay these out between the initial input and final output. When this is completed they should lay down the outputs from each activity.

This is a great exercise for getting people to remember the 5 step methodology and to think about the key difference between an activity and an output from each activity. For larger training groups it can be even more fun to break the group into smaller teams and have them compete for who finishes the exercise first.

Process training game for Directors and Execs

This is a similar game to the above but also includes a board on which to place the cards. As well as training people to think about high level value stream processes, it’s also useful ‘homework’ for business leaders to do before a process workshop.

In this game there is a set of cards that describe high level activities, or capabilities, within common types of organisations. These cards are designed to be double sided so each sheet should be printed on the back of the previous sheet. Download the cards and board described below here.

On the front of each card is a high level activity. On the back of each card is a description of that activity. Once you have printed and cut out the cards you can print out the board on an A3 or over two A4 sheets.

In the exercise the group has to agree which of the key activities are relevant to their business. Then they should place them on the board in the preferred sequence. Note, it’s not always possible to put all activities in a perfect sequence – thats ok. Its a great way however, to generate a discussion about why and how else they may be placed. You can use a marker pen to draw lines if you need to. Let the group be free to discuss and explore the topic.

Next the group needs to discuss, and then write down the first input and final output on their sequence. Once this is done they then need to complete each of the handover points between each activity. This will generate a lot of important discussion and often leads to improvement suggestions that need to be recorded. Make sure you or someone in the room is ready to take notes. You may find some really interesting points come out of this part of the session.

Finally the team needs to fill out the Owner section under each of the activities. This means that they decide who, in the business, is ultimately accountable for the execution of each activity.

The cards can be stuck to the board but typically it needs to be documented in some way once the exercise is complete. Make sure you have a way to do this, you can always use the Skore platform as one easy way to map online.

Process improvement game

We are also going to include this fun game that can be used to come up with some real process improvements. We find it is useful in training as well as in a real process improvement workshop. The idea for this game originally came from Alec Sharp and is described in his book here.

The idea of this game is to take an existing process and try to identify improvement opportunities. When teams are so used to the existing process it can be hard for them to come up with new ideas. Therefore in this exercise the team takes a different view of the process which helps highlight issues.

With the process visible to everyone, a nominated speaker walks through the process out loud. However, at each step in the process the speaker articulates that step as something that absolutely MUST be done.

This forces the rest of the team to really think about why it MUST be done and whether it’s really necessary or can be replaced by something easier.

Really simple steps in a process can sound ridiculous when articulated in this way so it sparks a bit of fun. In doing so it also releases fun suggestions that can lead to real improvement ideas.

This game is highly recommended where teams are looking to run process improvements on existing processes.

Dogs in space game

Finally Dogs in space is our name for a lateral thinking exercise that’s particularly useful where you are looking to truly transform a process, or design something completely new. Lateral thinking exercises can seem a bit awkward at first but once the team gets going it can be a liberating experience.

The object of the exercise is to come up with the most far fetched ideas based on the vague context of the problem that you want to solve (see our Petcare example below). Each member of the group should come up with an idea. The ideas are shared and then the group votes on their favourite idea.

Next the team must try to work out how they will achieve the solution. What are the steps required to get there and how would it work. During these solution sessions teams will often come up with innovative ideas for solving long standing problems.

The name of this exercise came from a Petcare company who were looking to expand their service offerings. The team were challenged to think of new services they could offer to pet owners. Using this type of lateral thinking, one of the suggestions was to put a dog on the moon. This was chosen by the group to explore further.

One of the challenges for putting a dog on the moon is the transport required to get there. The team discussed partnering with SpaceX to use their rockets to get there. Then they explored how they would kit out the rocket to be dog friendly. A team of experts would be assembled that had different skills drawn from the existing business.

It was at this point that the team realised this new group of experts could actually be used to provide advisory services across different industries. Advising businesses on making the workplace pet friendly, advising hotels and tourist attractions etc. In this way a new service line was developed and launched by the company. This is a really great example of how what can be perceived as a little fun can actually produce some great insights and bright ideas for the organisation.

Conclusion

Each of these business process training games are designed to help educate teams on the nature and benefits of business process improvement. When you’re buried in a process everyday it can be very hard to think differently about it. Each of these games provide a different lens for people to look at their processes and come up with new ways of working.

At Skore we use these in training or real live process workshops to kick off conversations. The Skore platform uses UPN (Universal Process Notation), the simplest way to capture and describe a process and is designed to be understood by everyone in the organisation, not just the experts. Processes can be visualised and mapped straight into the software while people describe them. These games make an excellent addition to workshops that help accelerate process improvement and generate innovative new ideas that can again be captured directly into Skore and shared with the wider team.

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Quick Refresh: What Is Lean Waste

We’ve covered lean waste’s particulars elsewhere in our blog, so we’ll offer a more concise version here.

Lean waste boils down to any part of your process business in which an action does not provide value to the customer. In other words: an action in your process that is not covered by your customer’s payment as it has no value to them.

It basically means you are doing more work and losing money.

According to the lean manufacturing management philosophy, there are eight kinds of waste:

Transport
Inventory
Motion
Waiting
Overproduction
Overprocessing
Defects
Skills

These are the parts of your process you want to look at when it comes time to document and identify your lean waste.

But what’s the best way to document your lean waste?

Tip 1: Simplify As Much as Possible

The first tip is to keep everything simple.

Simplicity will keep things clear and understandable for everyone.

Your processes are probably not as complicated as you think they are.

By capturing your action steps on a process map, you will be able to make sense of what your process actually is. You can get rid of the fluff and simply grind down on what doing X part accomplishes for your overall business.

And once you’ve mapped out the process, you will be able to document where the lean waste is showing up.

In your map, you will be able to see what steps are resulting in one of the eight kinds of waste. A common one is waiting time in relation to sign-offs. By utilising a process map, you will be quickly able to determine and document when such a waiting period is taking place.

You can then take a closer look at the waiting time and any associated tasks. Business leaders often find that by creating over-complicated steps or forms to fill out, precious time is lost, and a lot of the time the information is actually doubled or also compiled in another step.

By breaking a process down into its simple components, it becomes easy to find the spots for process improvement, and simplify the process overall to document and then remove lean waste.

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Tip 2: Involve All Team Members

It’s important to involve all team members when documenting a process.

Typically done during a process mapping workshop, it can be done all together, virtually, or asynchronously with different people contributing their portion of tasks to the visualisation of the process.

The reason to include all team members that participate in a particular process is to make sure you don’t miss anything. As a business leader, you have an idea of how your business is run. However, as time goes on, those initial processes or ideas you had in place will most likely have changed or developed to accommodate for new possibilities.

Your employees working through the tasks are the ones who will know best how the process is currently running. And often, leaders find that there have been quite a few changes since they initially conceived the process.

Because these changes are often restricted to a particular team, however, there is a high chance of overlap with other teams tasks or more waiting time. As an organisation leader, one of the things to look out for is a lack of communication between teams. You want to create a space for different teams to share their steps and then compare what they’re each doing.

If teams have taken on certain responsibilities or tasks because they need information to move forward, but another team is also compiling this information for their own reasons, it makes sense to unite them.

That time spent on a similar task by both teams is lean waste. And would not be found unless you involved everyone in your process mapping workshop.

By getting everyone involved, you can find, document, and then improve on the lean waste.

Tip 3: Clear Responsibilities

Having clear responsibilities will also help you find and document lean waste.

Often a by-product of running your workshop, you’ll discover that one of the reasons sign-offs take so long is that responsibility for tasks are not clear. When this is made clearer you can find out why something is taking so long and who needs to ensure that objectives are delivered on time.

But you won’t know unless you take the time to document your process and map it out to find the lean waste that is being created by a lack of clarity.

Once it becomes clear which role and title is responsible for what action in the process, everything will move along a lot quicker and smoother. Any kinks can be worked on as they come, and responsibilities can be shuffled around as needed until you find the perfect rhythm.

Tip 4: Keep an Eye on Your Numbers

But all of the above is only part of the whole picture.

You want to keep an eye on your numbers constantly to know when it’s time to document and save information to share with your stakeholders.

After all, if there’s one thing your stakeholders will understand, it’s numerical data.

If things are taking longer, your revenue is probably growing slower than expected. Or it suddenly slows down even though it was growing steadily.

When faced with this change in your numerical data, you can revisit your process and discover if there’s something internal that’s causing lean waste to increase and affect your growth. If you’ve been documenting everything, it’ll be easy enough to find and then present to your stakeholders when it’s time to explain why you need to make certain changes.

It will also make the sign-off process go a lot faster between you and your stakeholders. You can present them with data that identifies the lean waste, and the steps that you are planning to take to fix it. Stakeholders will be able to quickly understand and agree with the changes you plan to take. After all, as we know, lean waste is essentially needless activities, and they will be just as keen to fix that.

Tip 5: Use Process Management Software

All of our tips are great if you have a way to stay on top of your processes. But we know that often this can be hard, especially if you are used to doing things by hand.

It’s the digital age, and process management software such as Skore exists.

At Skore, we help you document and stay on top of your lean waste.

Our easy mapping system is based on Universal Process Notation (UPN), meaning it is easy for everyone involved in a process to follow along. No aspect of a process is missed when everyone in the workshop can understand what each part of the map means and how their actions contribute to it. It’s also a great way to build company morale and confidence, as employees can understand how they contribute to your growth.

The maps built on Skore have roles assigned to each action as well, so it is easy to figure out why someone may be taking more time on accomplishing a particular task. If someone is in training, they can consult the maps anytime by accessing the process map library. This also helps diminish the lean waste of asking several people before landing at the answer.

Skore’s Quantify solution also provides you access to the numerical data you want to keep an eye on. A dashboard of numerical insights will be provided, with trouble spots pointed out where changes can be made.

Additionally, process reviews encourage users to constantly check on their processes and see if there are any areas that would benefit from improvement. This means you don’t have to pencil in constant workshops with all of your teams, simply supervise the status of the process and see if there are steps to improve, and what is surrounding them, and only involve those who are part of it.

Effectively, the tool documents the lean waste for you.

Using process management software is the best move you can make to document lean waste

Conclusion

Documenting lean waste is a necessity if you want to make a change in your processes.

It helps you demonstrate to your stakeholders why you need to make a change, and it also helps you communicate it to your employees.

If you’re looking to document lean waste to make an impact and improve your processes, please be sure to get in touch.

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Simplifying Clinical Trial Management Processes

23 May 2023 - Craig J Willis - BlogTagged clinical trial management process, clinical trial management processes, clinical trial processes

Clinical trials are vital components of research to help humanity. It’s how we get vaccines and life-saving medicine that helps many of us navigate life.

But managing these trials and the processes that come with them is no easy task.

With so many moving parts and a need for risk management, it is no wonder clinical trial managers often find themselves dealing with difficult situations.

In this article, we’ll go over the challenges that documenting a successful clinical trial process faces, and how they can be easily simplified with the right platform.

Challenges of Managing a Successful Clinical Trial Process

Managing a successful clinical trial process is difficult. Not only are there very real humans being put through this process, but there are also great risks to them and to the organisations behind the trials.

Having advised and worked with clients in this area iin the last few years, we’ve been able to determine some key challenges faced.

Need for documentation

Documentation is vital for any part of a clinical trial to be successful. Whether it is for preparing for the trial, during the trial, or after the trial, it is imperative that every part of it is documented correctly and accurately. Documenting it all is necessary to ensure patents go through later on, or scientific findings can be corroborated and presented for future study.

All relevant trial documentation has to be easy to find and understand at various stages of the overall process for it to be accessible and useful to everyone involved.

Often trials do not have a centralized documentation system. This makes information difficult to find and slows everything down, as it is essential to ensure the clinical trial process is followed to the letter.

Wrong technology

Clinical trials do not shy away from using technology. After all, what’s being tried will have been made with top-of-the-line tech.

The problem can be with how the trial is documented in the first place. Not having a platform that is fit for purpose can mean that your organisation is let down by administration and bureaucracy after spending millions on incredible research or technology in the first place.

Teams may be trying to manage using spreadsheets or other document-gathering applications based on what they have always known. But this doesn’t always solve the problems.

Lack of standardised notation

The problem with mapping your own process management system is that not everyone will understand it. It is often not standardised, making it difficult for newcomers or others to read and interpret it.

Clinical trial managers building their own systems and notations for their processes with the technology they have is great so long as that manager is retained. When the trial is scaled or the manager leaves, it’s back to square one. Or, if someone new arrives or the team grows, the way they interpret certain parts of the process can be different, meaning the process is no longer clear and there is no standard, uniform way of getting things done.

This is the last thing you want to happen with something as sensitive as a clinical trial.

Wasted time

As a result of this lack of standardisation and easily accessible information, your organisation is wasting time

Clinical trial managers are constantly retracing steps employees or others have taken to understand what happened at a certain point that diverged from the norm.

The process that you have carefully mapped and monitored suddenly becomes useless as interpretations vary and the data becomes stale. In an area of industry where risk management and clarity are so vital, this is not something you can afford. The importance of having your best practice processes documented is essential.

Therefore not only is this wasted time, it is also wasted money.

Lack of accountability and clarity

A large part of the reason for this is that there is also a lack of accountability and transparency with accountability.

Clinical trials are a big deal, and you can never prepare for all eventualities. For compliance and risk management purposes, and also for the day-to-day actions during the trial, it is absolutely necessary to know who is responsible for what.

If you do not know this, the entire process can easily grind to a halt waiting for sign-off, leading to lost time, or an action never taking place because no one is willing to take responsibility for it.

Lack of clarity when it comes to accountability is one of the easiest ways to ensure your process does not move forward.

The process is not followed correctly

All of the above points essentially lead to this: the established process is not followed correctly during the clinical trial.

Often because it is not clear what that process is.

Mistakes happen constantly, steps are missed or dismissed from some parts without prior consultation, and there is a lack of compliance and responsibility slowing everything down.

And when the process is not followed during a sensitive situation such as a clinical trial, it is very easy for the entire thing to be questioned or invalidated and the data not viable.

This means lost time and money for all involved parties, and a need to set up everything again. Only to be faced with the same challenges.

Simplifying the Clinical Trial Management Process

Clinical trial processes and their management should not be complicated.

With the right tools and platform, they are not.

We’re obviously biased, but only because we know we are already making a difference in clinical trials process management, and we’re ready to continue making an impact in this field.

Skore accounts for all of the challenges outlined above and solves them.

Our platform is created to simplify everything by first taking users back to the basics of their process. The first step is to map out how your current process is working. Really take the time to dive in and discover how things are running currently by involving everyone in the team in a process workshop. Doing so enables users to identify bottlenecks: places where things are missing or slowed down and can be improved upon.

While users often find these places during workshops, Skore as a tool will also point these trouble areas out once you input in all additional data. The more information and the more reflective your process maps are of the actual situation, the better for Skore to work its magic.

The entire purpose of our platform is to have all of your processes mapped and documented in one single collaborative place, accessible to your entire team. The existence of process libraries ensures the centralization of all of the relevant information needed to run a clinical trial. Users can re-visit as many times as necessary to make sure they’re following the right steps. They simply have to search for the relevant process on Skore and take a look.

And, because we use Universal Process Notation (UPN), it means that the way of reading the maps is standardised and easily understood. No more confusion or need for a specific individual to be present in order to move on to the next step.

Additionally, our process maps allow users to attach any relevant data without overstuffing the steps. You can add relevant forms or trial or patient information wherever it is needed. This makes the process maps easy to follow and understand for any team member.

If there’s a sub-processes for another step required, Skore also helps visualise it without encumbering the overall map. Instead, you can dive deeper into that particular step to find the sub-process needed by simply clicking on it.

All processes become easy to follow and understand, as the map clearly outlines what should be done next. Each step also has an area for the specific role in charge, ensuring accountability is clear. It clarifies who is in charge of what and when they have to do it, so questions can be brought to the correct individuals.

No more stalling or grinding to a halt when requiring compliance sign-off as it is passed around like a hot potato. It becomes transparent and clear who has to do it, which also helps identify when and why the process might slow down.

With Skore, clinical trial process managers have found themselves gaining back tons of time. Their management processes have become streamlined and a lot more efficient. Clarity becomes the norm and they no longer have to rely on a spreadsheet created by a manager at a different location that is difficult to understand.

Having all the processes existing under one roof and with one simple notation makes everything run smoother, and makes it possible to scale clinical trials even further.

Conclusion

Being in charge of clinical trial management processes is difficult enough as it is.

Skore helps take away any overcomplications that may affect how the trial runs, instead offering clarity and support every step of the way.

The team will be connected and there will be no doubt when it comes to responsibilities.

Are you a clinical trial manager looking to become more efficient?

Get in touch and our team will be happy to guide you!

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