Why you track your life, but not your processes?

I’m confident you can pick up your smart phone and piece together a significant portion of your life in the past day, month, even years! Like it or not, you have the answers to the questions within arms reach of you:

  • How much sleep did you get last night? Did I sleep better this week than the week before? (Health App)

  • What time/date was your last Starbucks order? What did you get? (Loyalty App)

  • When was the last time you visited a grocery store, how much was the bill? (Bank App)

  • Which friend was the last to go on vacation? (Instagram / Facebook)

  • How much time did you spend in the car travelling? (Google Locate)

We can get even more specific, right? How about, what stores did you spend money on, 6 Sundays ago, how much time did you spend there?

This kind of information exists all over the place and you better believe this information can exist at your fingertips at work, too.

ELI5: SO HOW DOES THIS WORK WITH PROCESSES

Almost everything we do generate footprints and time stamps in today’s systems.  Whether it’s an email that says ‘approved’, an update of stock, a customer calling in, or an invoice being paid. The system almost always knows exactly what happened, when it happened, and who did it.

Not too dissimilar to reviewing where you traveled in Google, we can use these breadcrumbs to chronologically piece together the end-to-end process of every instance of the widget flowing through the system.

PROCESS PLAYBACKS

A great way to build a common understanding of the end-to-end process is the get all the stakeholders in a room and show them what the process is saying. It’s the single best way to ensure that information is flowing and everyone is aligned. Where are the hot spots? Where are things getting stuck? Who owns this part of the process? Are there established service levels? How does this impact the work they do on a day-to-day basis?

Traditionally, this would be done through a current state mapping process — think long days with subject matter experts and lots of sticky notes.

Our philosophy is a little different, spend less time on gathering input in a workshop with all the stakeholders — that’s what we bring to the table as a buy in — and more time having the real value-add conversations and aligning on the actions.

  • Provide a rock-solid subway map of the processes with the cycle times, paths, and most common variants;

  • Layer different perspectives (e.g. what does this look like from the customer view, show me the life of a material/part before it connects into the process)

  • Discuss conformance and ‘unhappy paths’ to be eliminated via maturing standards;

The really neat part is this process playback isn’t a one time thing; you can check back in on this weekly/monthly to see if the changes you made impacted your KPIs or if further action should be taken.

That’s all for now.