Map, Measure & Improve: 3 Types of Flowcharts for Process Mapping

Contributor:  Steven Bonacorsi
Posted:  02/21/2012  12:00:00 AM EST  |  1  

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Tags:   process mapping with flowcharts | DMAIC | Six Sigma | Steve Bonacorsi | Methodologies, Statistical Analysis, and Tools 

Trying to map the flow of your process before improving it? Here's a primer on the 3 different kinds of flowcharts you can use. Includes step by step instructions on creating Top-Down, Deployment and Detailed flowcharts.

A flowchart is an outline or schematic drawing of the process your team is trying to measure or improve. It can also be a picture of an ideal process that you would like to use. Process mapping with flowcharts can help people:

• Agree on the steps of a process and the order in which they occur
• See some of the duplicated effort and other non-value-added steps that might be lurking in a process
• Clarify working relationships between people and organizations
• Target specific steps in the process for improvement.

Process mapping is especially useful in the measure and analyze phases of Lean Six Sigma methodology. There are several kinds of flowcharts. In this article we will look at Top-down flowcharts, Deployment flowcharts, and detailed flowcharts.

Flowchart #1: Top-down Flowchart

The simplest is the top-down flowchart.

What can it do for you?

• Tell what the major clusters of activity are—the ones that are essential to the total process.
• Show what the process would look like without the steps that have accumulated over time to shore up an inefficient or faulty process.

How do you make one?

Step 1: List the most basic steps of the process. Limit these to no more than five or six major steps.

Step 2: Write the major steps across the top of a board, flipchart or piece of paper in the order that they occur in the process.

Step 3: Under each major step, list the sub-steps that make up that element of the process. List them in the order that they occur.

Again, limit yourself to no more than five or six sub-steps for each major step.

Now what?

The picture you have created will show only the useful work that goes into the process.

• Compare this to the way things are actually done. Ask: “What can be done to eliminate unnecessary work?”
• Talk to your customers. Ask: “How can we improve the process to better please the people who receive our work?”
• Look at the essential process. Ask: “How can we change the process to make fewer errors and increase our speed of delivery?”

The top-down flowchart can be used for planning new processes as well as examining existing ones. It helps keep people focused on the whole process instead of getting lost in details. Details can be worked out by the team members responsible for that part of the process.

Flowchart #2: Deployment Flowchart

Another flowchart is the deployment chart. While the top-down flowchart tells what, the deployment chart shows both what and who. 

What can it do for you?

• Show how the people involved fit together.
• Keep track of what each person or organization is supposed to do.

How do you make one?

Step 1: List the major steps of the process in the order in which they occur. This might be the output of your work with a top-down flowchart or you might use some other technique to create this list.

Step 2: Across the top of your board, flipchart or paper write the names of the people or organizations involved in the process.

Step 3: Under the name of the person or organization responsible for the first step in the process, draw a box and write that step in the box. If more than one person or group is responsible for a step, extend the box so it is also under the name of that person or group.

Step 4: If any of the other people or groups help or advise the ones with primary responsibility for that step, draw an oval under the names of those people or groups.

Step 5: Connect the ovals to the box with the process step in it.

Step 6: After the first step is complete, put the second step under the people responsible for it.

Step 7: Connect the first step to the second step, and then add ovals for any helpers or advisors in the second process step. Keep going this way with all the steps in the process.

Now what?

The completed chart tells not only how the process operates at each step, but who is involved and what responsibility they each have.

Ask:

• “Are the right people involved at the right time in the process?”
• “Are there too many people involved or too many hand-offs?”
• “Are there barriers between people who must work together to make the process work?”

The deployment chart can be as simple (just major steps) or as involved (sub-steps and sub-sub-steps) as you need to make it. 

Flowchart #3: Detailed Flowchart

Generally top-down and deployment charts are enough to examine a process, but sometimes teams need more detail to see where problems are occurring.

What can it do for you?

• Show what actually happens at each step in the process in detail
• Show what happens when non-standard events occur
• Graphically display processes so you can easily see redundancies and other wasted effort.

How do you do it?

To construct a detailed flowchart, various symbols can be used to represent process steps.

Step 1: Draw the first symbol, and then write a description of the process step inside the symbol.

Step 2: Draw the second symbol. Write the description. Connect the two symbols with an arrow showing the direction of flow.

Step 3: Continue this way until you have completed the process or the part of the process you wanted to examine.

Each symbol should represent only one action or one yes-no decision. This is what gives the detailed flowchart its detail. It is also what makes the creation of detailed flowcharts so time consuming.

Each symbol should represent only one action or one yes-no decision. This is what gives the detailed flowchart its detail. It is also what makes the creation of detailed flowcharts so time consuming.

Now what?

Look at the completed flowchart.

Ask:

• Where are there redundancies that could be eliminated?
• Where are there steps that seem out of order?
• What steps are missing that could improve the process?
• Where is time lost waiting or sending things back and forth?
• What steps add no value to the customer?

A detailed flowchart can be a powerful tool for examining a process that has built up needless complexity, but be warned. Creating all this detail is time-consuming.

Before you begin, ask:

• Is all this detail necessary?
• Can the detailed flowchart be limited to only a small part of the total process?

Five Barriers to Continuous Improvement - Vote for the Worst Offender

Contributor:  Ýr Gunnarsdóttir
Posted:  02/22/2012  12:00:00 AM EST  |  2  

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Tags:   Ýr Gunnarsdóttir | Nimbus | TIBCO | polls | Training and Talent Development 

Mirror, mirror on the wall, what’s the greatest barrier of all?

Continuous process improvement is increasingly being touted as a competitive differentiator, but all too often companies are their own worst enemies, writes contributor Ýr Gunnarsdóttir. Here are the main barriers to continuous improvement – plus an invitation to vote on the one you think is the worst offender.

What is the greatest barrier to continuous improvement? Take the poll now!

Continuous Improvement (CI) is something of an umbrella term and may encompass a variety of disciplines and methodologies including Business Process Management, Performance Management, Quality Management, Compliance, Lean, Six Sigma and more.

Despite all the different terms, techniques and methods available, there are commonalities between these different approaches - they all seek to continuously improve business processes in order to enhance business results. Increasingly, continuous process improvement is being touted as a competitive differentiator; analyst firmGartner predicted last year that “between now and year-end 2014, overlooked but easily detectable business process defects will topple 10 Global 2000 companies.”

But all too often companies are their own worst enemies when it comes to process improvement. In an article for the Wall Street Journal last year, for instance, Dr. Satya Chakravorty,a professor of operations management at Kennesaw State University, claimed that nearly 60% of all corporate Six Sigma initiatives fail to yield the desired results, comparing process improvement to weight loss programs that “start off well […] but all too often fail to have a lasting impact as participants gradually lose motivation and fall back into old habits.”

So what’s happening? If continuous improvement is so critical to the health of an organization – why is it so difficult and why are so many projects doomed to failure? Here are what I consider the main barriers to continuous improvement.

Barrier #1: Difficult to foster collaboration between multiple stakeholders

So many stakeholders need to be engaged in continuous improvement: Process Owners and SMEs, Process Analysts, Lean / SixSigma specialists, Quality Managers, IT, Training. If you’re in a highly regulated industry the list of stakeholders probably includes Risk and Compliance Officers as well. That list probably just covers who needs to be involved in process capture, review and agreement. When you roll-out change you’d better add to that list all your employees affected by the change, who need to adopt new ways of working. With multiple initiatives that are likely to be at very different lifecycle stages, how on earth do you get this community focused and working in unison?

 How do you get all the stakeholders working together?

 Barrier #2: Difficult to identify which processes to prioritize improvement efforts on

There’s no shortage of good ideas for what could be improved at any organization. But how do you prioritize? For some of you the corporate strategy may be clear, for others you may have a sense of initiative overload and just a barrage of urgent priorities. How do you assess improvement initiatives and evaluate them in terms of value and priority to the corporate strategy and business imperatives?

A major contributor to such difficulty in agreeing priorities for improvement is likely to be Wrong or Fuzzy KPIs. Are you measuring the right things? Do the KPIs connect to the strategy? Can you relate the KPIs to relevant processes? Do the right people look at the right measures? Are they empowered to do something constructive as a consequence? (Performance Management vs. Performance Reporting.) Measure too much and you could be paralyzed by information overload? Or perhaps you haven’t got timely and relevant data you can trust to base sound decisions on. It’s easy to see how identifying what improvement initiatives to prioritize is so often cited as the main barrier.

Barrier #3: Ill-suited Process Management tooling

There’s no shortage of business process management software to choose from, but either of the following situations could undermine your CI efforts.

Process Management tooling is inadequate

Paper based methods and Microsoft Office or Visio are ubiquitously available and seen as the free (or already paid for) option. But processes are supposed to be treated as assets. They need capturing, analyzing, improving and deploying or else you’re not going to exploit these valuable knowledge assets to best effect. Some sort of Business Process Management tooling will ultimately be required for CI to operate efficiently.

Process Management tooling is too complicated

Your IT department blew the budget on bloated business process management applications which met their automation goals. Now they’re trying to impose such tooling on the business. “You’d better use it, we paid a fortune for this”, may sound familiar? Although automation is an important aspect of process improvement, the tools used need to align with the different audiences.  If the learning curve is too steep such process management tools will be a barrier to engaging the right people in process ownership and improvement. The risk is that the business audience might  throw in the towel and go back to brown paper, MS Office and Visio.

Barrier #4: Governing / controlling change (to meet compliance obligations)

If you’re in a highly regulated industry you may be beset with Standard Operating Procedures and rigorous document controls which make agile analysis and deployment of change a real headache. But if you need to regularly prove to auditors that your processes, procedures, controls and compliance obligations are all under control, you’re going to have to contend with a considerable governance overhead.

Barrier #5: Lack of employee engagement

Employee engagement challenges can be considered from two perspectives. How do you achieve adoption of change by the employees?  How do you foster sustained commitment to bottom-up improvement?  Let’s consider these in turn.

Enforcing adoption of change by employees

Just like the best made plans, your new shiny and improved processes will deliver nothing if employees are ignorant of them, forget them or just plain fail to follow them. And by definition CI means a continuous drip feed of improvements. The risk is employees get change-exhaustion, and will soon become skeptical or even hostile to continuing change, if you communicate with them inconsistently. How do you give them a single source of the truth for all processes and procedures? How do you make it easy for them to find what they need, know which changes impact their role? And how do you know that they read and understood what’s required of them?

Gaining bottom up contribution and commitment

How do you empower all of your employees to get involved in CI? How do you enthuse and energize them, not just informing them of change but ensuring that they can contribute to the improvement process themselves? Are the methods which you use to do this effective? Can you harness new technologies such as enterprise social platforms to facilitate this bottom up contribution, or are such tools just likely to contribute to unstructured information overload?

At January’s PEX Week conference (one of the largest global gatherings of process professionals) over 40% of respondents said that identifying which processes to prioritize improvement efforts on was their main barrier for continuous Improvement.

But what do you think? Join the poll to have your say and find out what other PEX Members are thinking – vote now!

Nimbus - a TIBCO company - will be examining these issues in a summary report in March and including the results in an upcoming PEX Network webinar, which will be free to attend.

Contributor:   Ýr Gunnarsdóttir

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