Process Mapping Gone Wild...

High Performance Team Challenge-Day 9

“There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.”-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

This quote might be a little on the dramatic side, but the thought behind it definitely applies to team performance and alignment. For many reasons, it is really easy for people to get so  involved in crossing items off of their task lists, responding to “emergencies” and dealing with the minutiae of work life, that they forget about the overall mission, vision and purpose of the team. In some corporate environments, “busyness” can be misinterpreted as doing business.

“Never mistake activity for achievement”.-John Wooden

A quick and often surprisingly profound way to help your team re-focus on what really matters is to conduct at least one, and possibly a series of Simple Process Mapping Sessions. Team Leaders and members are often under the mistaken assumption that “everyone knows what I do/what the team does.” This is not usually the reality. Over time, team roles and processes go through subtle shifts-conditions change, then an informal response, fix or step is implemented or removed, and eventually the process is not performing as originally designed (if it was originally designed.) This is a natural aspect of systems, and can be easily examined using the exercise we will outline here. In Six-Sigma, Lean Manufacturing and other “Quality” circles “Process Mapping” refers to a few relatively sophisticated problem solving tools.

While related, the Process Mapping exercise we will discuss here today is much simpler, and the primary focus in on communication and alignment amongst team members, with the added benefits of providing a first step in working toward process improvement and enhanced efficiency.

The steps are simple:

1.Gather team members for a time-defined meeting, ideally, no more than 90 minutes.(These steps are assuming no geographical challenges-for teams that are geographically separated, the steps are the same, the specific methods will be different, but can be accomplished with online meeting tools.)

2.Using either a long sheet of “butcher paper” or a series of flip chart sheets attached together, draw a timeline across at approximately the top 1/3rd point on the paper.

3.Label the start and the end of the timeline with the the first and last steps of the process you are planning to “map” (For example: A sales team may start with “A lead comes in…, and end with “The new customer signs the contract… a shipping department’s timeline might begin with “the product arrives on the conveyor…” and end with “UPS picks up the package from the dock…”

4.Next, give team members plenty of post it notes, and ask them to list all of the tasks (one task per post it), that they perform in their job (not only the ones directly related to the process being mapped)).

5.Next, ask team members to stick all of their post its under but along the timeline in the approximate order where they “fit”, with tasks that are directly related being closest to the timeline and the ones least related further below.

6 After this step is completed by everyone, give team members a few minutes to just look at and read everyone’s post its. (You will likely hear comments such as ” I didn’t know you did that!” or “I hate those.” or “How often do we have to do that?”)

7. Now ask team members to collectively organize and categorize the post its into like items, and when finished, to label the categories. (If there are more than 5-6 people in the room, you may want to divide everyone into “waves” for this step.

8. Next, ask people to do one final prioritization, in descending order, of all of the tasks, into categories such as: Extremely important (closest to the timeline), Sometimes important (next) Never or seldom important (furthest from the timeline, at the bottom of the paper)

9. Now, with everyone sitting in a semicircle, where they can see each other and the process map they just created, ask the team to first discuss what they learned about the team and each other’s roles, then what they noticed about how they spend their own time.

Resist the urge to instantly spring into “problem solving mode”. Trying to “fix” things too soon and/or haphazardly can lead to new difficulties in the process. Let people know that this is the beginning of a more effective team and process, not the end. At this point, you and the team will have a lot of data to sift through and evaluate, likely an eye opening team experience, and an enhanced sense of alignment. We will discuss how to use the results of this process in future posts.