I\u2019ve been through a lot of process mapping sessions in my life.\u00a0 I\u2019ve had the good opportunity to lead many, and also the opportunity to sit in and observe.\u00a0 It always surprises me how often the current state processes are mapped, and then people go straight into the future state process mapping without real reflection.\u00a0 Sometimes I\u2019ve even seen people go into future state without bothering with mapping the current state.<\/p>\n
There are a couple of ways to draw conclusions from current state maps.\u00a0 Usually consulting organizations or the internal organization will simply look at the current state maps and compare them against best practices that the consultants have experienced with other clients.\u00a0 It\u2019s funny when a software vendor does process mapping because inevitably the opportunities that they find in the current state have nothing to do with industry leading practices, but instead about software capabilities.\u00a0 Theoretically these capabilities should be roughly aligned with leading practices and client enhancement requests, but if you look at future state demos, they are still all about the flashiness of the product and not demonstrating business and process value.<\/p>\n
The second way of looking at current state processes is the Kaizen burst, a method used often in LEAN approaches.\u00a0 The Kaizen burst looks at the current state process and asks a series of questions.\u00a0 Where is there delay\/waiting, unnecessary transportation, over-processing, and excess motion.\u00a0 You can often see these wastes from the current state process maps based on simply the number of boxes involved in a particular sub-process.\u00a0 For example, you can find unnecessary transportation in the HR arena pretty much any place you have a manual handoff that software could automate in a workflow.\u00a0 Over processing often involves a single process that is performed by more than one person, or might involve multiple systems to complete the process.\u00a0 Whatever it is, Kaizen bursts are useful to view waste and identify where the ore opportunities are \u2013 it\u2019s sort of the 80\/20 rule, and the Kaizen burst can easily and quickly identify the 80% in 20% of the time, in other words, it will identify the low hanging fruit.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not saying that you should go in and implement the Kaizen burst or a LEAN methodology, every quality and process methodology has a similar approach.\u00a0 What I am saying is that these approaches yield a quick analysis that is often a simple visual measurement of the current state process and that they can discover significant cost savings without much effort.\u00a0 They also take you away from the wrote consulting or vendor \u201cboxes\u201d that seem so prevalent in the industry these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve been through a lot of process mapping sessions in my life.\u00a0 I\u2019ve had the good opportunity to lead many, and also the opportunity to sit in and observe.\u00a0 It always surprises me how often the current state processes are…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hr-service-delivery","category-hr-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1139"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1140,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1139\/revisions\/1140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}