AJC LnL How to do Process Mapping in a Virtual Environment

Again, thanks for joining How to Do Virtual Process Mapping. I'm Andrea with Andrea Jones Consulting. Appreciate your joining today. Here's our agenda for today. We are going to talk about what a process map is, why you would do process mapping with a team, the basics of process mapping, and then virtual process mapping best practices and some pros and cons of virtual versus in person. All right, so a process map is a visual or symbolic representation of the activities or steps necessary to complete a task or work activity. And this is an example with swim lanes. Certainly they aren't all this complex, but some examples of things you might want to map in order to fulfillment process, maybe new product introduction, Onboarding a new employee is a process. Anything around accounts payable or accounts receivable, anything that people are doing and you say to yourself, how do we do this? Those are the things that can be mapped. Here's a couple pictures, paper ones, of the types of process maps. And the first one at the top there is a current state. So the current state process map is what's actually being done at At the time you're doing the mapping, and we'll talk about this in a minute. But the reason that you might want to do it in person with people, or just in general, is everybody does things a little bit differently. Sometimes that's why you're mapping, is to standardize how things are done. So the current state tends to be pretty messy. The future state, or maybe you call it the to-be state, that's the improved state after you've incorporated all the changes, and maybe there's some personnel changes or roles, responsibilities, or infrastructure you need to add. And that's— that picture at the bottom is an example of a future state. You can tell that it's quite a bit cleaner than the current state. But what I tell people is the future state may have a couple of versions. One is the reality state, which is, hey, if we did all of this stuff, we'd have to buy new software, we'd have to totally change roles, responsibilities, or whatever it might be, and that's just not reality for us today. So I'd like to talk about the reality state being the improved flow given constraints, and those are often all of your low-hanging fruit, the things that you can change without spending a ton of money or taking an exorbitant amount of time. But the ideal state is what you're going for, and you always need to keep it in mind because even though, you know, ideal or perfect is theoretically impossible to achieve, You're always striving for that, and there's a reason we call this continuous improvement. And when we do this type of thing, when we're looking at maybe a new ERP system implementation, for example, right, you'll come up with a bunch of little low-hanging fruit things you can do now, but that future state will be driving your requirements and the stuff you're looking for in your new system. So it's important to have that in mind. This is probably my favorite part. Why would you do process mapping with a team? So one main reason different people may see the same thing differently. And, you know, this is a great visual. There's usually at least 3 versions of a process. There's what you think the process is, right? And everybody might have different versions of that. What it actually is, which is complicated and people doing things differently and different sidebars and flows. And of course, what you want it to be, which is a nice streamlined, easy to do, easy to understand. process. So bringing everybody together, it really gives you a full picture. All right, and so it'll increase accuracy of whatever it is you're doing to really understand what's happening, and a diverse or cross-functional team will add to that. When we do mapping as a team, it's nice when you have the customer of whatever the process is to help you understand whether you're really fulfilling that need, and the customer isn't necessarily outside of your company. There's obviously internal customers. If you do have a process though that would touch an external customer, somebody should be representing the voice of that customer. I love this part. Everyone sees what everyone else is doing, especially in cross-functional. You're thinking to yourself, oh my gosh, I had no idea you had to do that if I don't give you the information in this way that you have all these workarounds, or wow, you do it like this, so I do it like that, right? So everyone gets to really understand what's actually happening, which leads to improved buy-in for whatever it is you're going to change. When people feel like they can voice what they're doing and why they're doing it and have their perspectives heard, then when you make changes, they tend to buy in more because they participated. So that leads to improved results because everybody has participated and given their ideas. Sometimes that groupthink gets different ideas than an individual would have on his or her own. And improve results. You want to realize those results, and doing mapping as a team can reduce resistance to change. The best practice here, it says, quickly aligns the mapping team to the new process. Everybody sees what's happening. They've seen all these pain points. They want to help each other, and it's natural to want to do that when you're together in a team and you feel the empathetic feelings of how it's being painful for people. So they align, and the best practice is, if you have people who are maybe skeptics in your organization and don't like to change, highly recommend bringing them into your process mapping. Their voices get heard, their ideas are part of it, and then they often are very influential, and they'll go back and become champions in the organization, and they're not resisting that change anymore. They're helping you propagate it. And so, That in turn leads to an improved pace of organizational change overall. So hopefully that helps encourage you all to consider doing mapping together with the team. So now I promised some process mapping basics. These are general things, whether you're in person or you're virtual. Bit of an eye candy chart, I realize, so I'll try to walk through it slowly. Understanding the roles and responsibilities, and we actually have a few slides to describe these further. There are a few roles in process mapping. There's a facilitator role, a scribe role, and of course, the team that is the subject matter expert group. It's always a best practice to set an agenda and have breaks. And I say be flexible-ish. So if you say you're going to have a break after an hour and a half and the conversation is flowing, and that's not the time to break in and cut it off, you know, it's fine to let it go until its natural conclusion and then have the break. But I would say end on time. Especially these days, people are back-to-back scheduled, and if you don't end on time and they're late for their next thing, and it just, you know, doesn't always sit well. So if you haven't finished, we'll talk about this later. Use the time you have. Oh, 5 minutes before we're supposed to be done, we're not quite finished. Let's schedule some follow-up time. For the map itself, you want to predefine your start and end points. So are you mapping order fulfillment from when the order comes in from the customer to when it's shipped out the door? Or from when it comes in from the customer to when the customer receives it. Those are different, and you have different levels of control, and it'll be different set of steps at the tail end. So you need to decide ahead of time what is it that you're actually mapping and what are those bookends. And then here's where I get really excited because I love doing these. You get to ask about every single step, and there's typically a happy path, which is where everything goes well. And then there's, you know, but this problem and that problem, the exception path, and there may be several of those. But what's being done? Who's doing that thing? What information do you need to do it right the first time, including any dependencies? An example there might be if you are placing an order and you need a PO number and accounting is the one to give you the PO number, right? The first step isn't placing the order, it's getting the PO number. So those types of dependencies. And where does that information come from that you need? How do you get that? And then when you're done with the particular step, how does that flow to the next step? Do you have to let somebody know it's their turn to do something, or does your system automatically let them know? Right? And where is all this information stored? And, and how do you get access to it? And the people have the right access. So all of these things need to be asked, and the facilitator is typically the responsible party to do that. They don't have to have the answers. In fact, it's best if they don't. We'll talk about that. But they need to be asking these questions and getting the group talking about them. Often also something will trigger another process or a side process, so that might need to be captured on the parking lot. Oh gosh, I forgot when this happens, when we put a new customer into our system, then we automatically have to send them all of our onboarding paperwork or something like that, which is a different process than order fulfillment. So we use a lot of lists when we're mapping. You can see in this picture here there's some lists there. This is Microsoft Whiteboard. It's a very simple tool we'll talk about later. And this is where I like to put things like, okay, order comes in from the customer. Is it email? Is it phone? Is it web? Is it through your online portal or, you know, whatever it might be? And you can just put all those list items in there and it's helpful to have that while you're going through it. Again, whether you're in person or virtual, you need to track all of these pain points that people are bringing up. What, what is causing the confusion? Where are the points where people are doing things differently? What ideas are they getting and what opportunities do you see for improvement? What are the parking lot items that aren't necessarily relevant to this process, but you don't want to forget? And those pain points and things will drive your future state, and the parking lot things might drive another process map. So it's important to keep track of all of that. So the bottom line here is the facilitator really needs to encourage the team to speak up and simultaneously stay on track and stay focused. So, what's more about the roles, responsibilities, and why do I think it's so important to have them? So, the facilitation team is the facilitator and the scribe. Facilitator is leading a session, drawing people out, all of these things that you see, managing the time, calling the parking lot. In a virtual session, they're calling on people to participate. You know, I've got you guys on mute and your cameras are off, but In a session, both of those things would be available. And if you naturally aren't the type of person to speak up, it's my job as the facilitator to ask you to say something. What do you think about this? Is there something we might be missing? Do you do it a different way? It's even more important in virtual when you can't see somebody straight face to face. And then the scribe— it is almost impossible to be the scribe and to be the facilitator at the same time. Or if you do it, you're constantly making people wait. Oh, hold on, I'm gonna go put that in the parking lot. You know, it just slows everything down. And the scribe will get it all documented in a virtual session. They're monitoring the chat to see if there's ideas that are coming up there. They're managing the time, you know, the facilitator is involved in the discussion and forgets to look at his or her watch or the clock. And then if they are noticing, oh, you already talked about that, this is redundant, can we, you know, help move on? So they're doing all of those things. It's also helpful the facilitator and the scribe are not part of the process. Because you can just imagine if you're trying to describe somebody's idea, but you have your own and you want to vocalize it, then one of those things is going to drop. Subject matter experts. These are the people that understand the process and the stakeholders of the process. They know the current state, and more importantly, they know what is value added to your organization. So, you know, it's hard for an objective 3rd party to know whether something very particular to your company or even your industry needs to go in your future state, or it could be a waste item that could get dropped. The subject matter experts have that level of knowledge, and the management team in general, they provide leadership. They've got to commit to supporting what the group is doing, whether that's verbally. I've had presidents come in at the beginning and just say, hey, look, this is important to me. We're paying money to get this done. My expectation is you guys participate and I'm going to support you. When you come up with something, or it's written, they're sending a note out, or whatever it is, very important that the leadership team is aligned and supportive. And then the individual contributors, some of whom may be some of the managers, of course, but they're participating. They have the expertise and the knowledge about the process. They're committing to use the new process, and they're committing, like I said before, as champions or trainers of the process within the organization. And then they pledge to keep going because, you know, just because you did it today, we talked to somebody the other day who documented their processes 6 years ago. That's great. Maybe things have changed. There's new technology, there's changes in the market, there's changes in customer needs. It might be time to look at them again. All right, so these are all just the basics of process mapping. I want to talk a bit about mechanics in person versus virtual. All right, so in person you need to have your physical stuff. You need your stickies, you need your Sharpies, you need your whiteboard or your butcher paper or whatever. There's a lot of supplies and you have to maintain them. In a virtual environment, there's still supplies or tools, but they're virtual, so you still have to maintain them. In person, it's, it's not terrible to do this for a whole day or even a day or 2 in a row because people just are naturally more energized when they're in person, but virtually you really just can't do much more than 3 or 4 hours in a day. Everybody gets zapped, prefrontal cortexes are off, so we'll talk about that a little bit again later. In person, it's very important that everything you write down on paper gets transcribed digitally. I don't always do that for the current state, to be honest. I might just take a picture and that's a decent transcription because The current state is going to change, but the future state must be transcribed. All of the list of items you don't want to forget, even the parking lot, all of that has to be saved. And, you know, we use the digital medium for that. So if you're just writing it down, you've got to do it digitally afterwards. In a virtual environment, by nature of doing it virtually, you already have it in that format. So that's actually kind of nice. But the participant and the roles and responsibilities of the participants, including the facilitator and the scribe, they're the same. Regardless of what you're doing, which medium you're using. Now what you've been waiting for, let's talk about virtual process mapping best practices. All right, I think it's very important to get people talking and typing. And, you know, most people these days are pretty used to typing in chats and things like that, but I'll do an intro where everybody gets to say something and everybody gets to type something at the beginning, and I'll lead it. to make sure that, you know, people understand, are comfortable. So for example, this is my favorite one. What's your favorite pet? So I ask people, go ahead and type your pet answer in the chat. That gets them chatting and typing, and then we'll go around the screen to verbally answer the questions. So I'll start. You know, I'm Andrea and I'm your facilitator, and I have been with my company for 17 years, and my favorite type of pet is my 2 cats. And then this is important. Any reason you need to step away today? Sometimes we've had people, you know, they just black out the screen and they walk off and you're like, are they still there? I have no idea. But if you can say ahead of time, hey, I'm expecting— like one guy said, I'm expecting the plumber. We had pipes break and this is the only time they could be here. Well, I want them to get their pipes fixed. So if the plumber comes between 10 and 11, we know you're going to drop off the screen for a minute. That's completely fine. And you want to give people the opportunity to say that ahead of time. So the facilitator asks the questions, and then I recommend that they go around the screen. If you're in a room, it's easy to start with the first person and go around a table. But if you're on the screen, everybody's orientations are different. It's hard to know whose turn it is to talk next. So as a facilitator, you just call the next person's name, and the scribe should share too, so people feel like they're involved. I actually had a high-level director with this pet question who brought his dog in front of the screen for everybody to see. So that's a fun one. It kind of disarms people. All right, 2nd tip, set expectations up front, share some ground rules. Of course, this is true in person as well. Share those roles and responsibilities that I described, and we actually have a blog on that that we'll put in the chat later and share the mechanics and what you expect from people. So, The ground rules that we have here are suggested. You can certainly do what you think is best for your group, but I recommend cameras on. It's hard to know, even if people are eating, I bet not now, but I'd rather see that than not know if they're there or not. And then type in the chat if you don't want to break in, somebody came to the door unexpectedly, whatever it might be. Or if you have a question and you want to put something out there, an idea, and the scribe will be monitoring that. Helpful to mute when you're not talking. Everybody's had that experience. Of course, when you come off, you have to take it off. You've had that experience too, but I had somebody who was, you know, maybe breathing a little more heavily, and that is super challenging. So I highly recommend muting when you're not talking, but then actively participate. And again, facilitators, it's really important to pay attention and call on people who haven't been talking. And I would even suggest the scribe might do that. I've got you guys on my side screen. I can't always see when people are not talking, but the scribe can know and maybe just say, hey, we haven't heard from so-and-so yet. Another ground rule: come back on time from breaks. This is true whether you're in person or not, but on a virtual screen, it's very hard to go find somebody and pull them out of that side conversation they're having in the hall. And then, like I said already, if you have to step away, especially if you haven't shared why, please just put in the chat so we know. You know, you're coming back. All right, 3rd tip is to prepare the right tool. So the 2 pictures I have here are tools that we use at AJC. The bottom in the blue screen is— it's Microsoft Whiteboards. Super simple. Anybody who has Office 365 gets it for free, so it's quick. There's no subscription, there's no extra licensing. It's just quick and dirty. I will say it's limited in its functionality, and one limitation is You can't collaborate with people outside of your domain, or at least not yet. So if I'm facilitating and I'm using Whiteboard with a client's company, they can't type on the screen, only I can if I'm facilitating. And that can be challenging because then I have to, you know, export it as a picture and send it over. But in Miro, which is the other one I'm showing here, you can have multiple collaborators. You don't actually have to have a license, you just have to get a, you know, to go in and get a password and username, but you can be on somebody else's board that they own. And it looks a little more professional, I think. It has quite a bit more capability and functionality than a basic tool like Whiteboard. So if it's something that you're trying to use that's going to be maybe put into your process documentation later, you might consider something more professional looking like a Miro or maybe a Lucidchart versus a Whiteboard. However, if you all have Office 365 and you're talking in a meeting, you're like, how do we do that? Just pop up the Whiteboard and just do it real fast, just like you would if you were in person. OK, the other thing that's important before you process map, if you can, is just prepare the right background files. The example I showed here is just what we use for capturing all of those ideas and opportunities. And in that same spreadsheet, we have a different tab for the parking lot things, because the team's going to have a lot of stuff that comes up and trying to write that down by hand or trying to just type it in a Word document and then later go back and categorize and sort. Is really hard. I highly recommend put it into the spreadsheet to start. Every idea or opportunity or pain gets its own row, and then later you can go back and categorize them. And you can see we do an impact ease assessment, which means here's all these ideas. If this is highly impactful and super easy, it goes to the top and it therefore becomes our low-hanging fruit. If it's highly impactful, but it's not easy, which probably means it's a new system. Hey, that's driving your system requirements right there. Super fast, easy to have that if you prepped ahead of time. And the scribe is capturing all of this in real time. Okay. The last tip is certainly to be respectful of time and the Zoom fatigue, which is very real. I said earlier, for an in-person session, you can do things 6 to 7 hours, knock it out in a day. That's not true in virtual. If you're doing a large process, you will have to chunk it up. So the idea here is I would suggest schedule 2 to 3 3-hour virtual sessions for any 1-day in-person session. So if you're doing the entire order fulfillment process, it's just not going to happen in 1 3-hour session. I can almost guarantee it. So do a couple of sessions, plan ahead if you can, and then if you don't finish, maybe you follow up with another 90 minutes. Something like that. Allow 10 to 15 minute breaks every 90 minutes of mapping again for people to get water, use the restroom, get some snacks, but be back on time. Remember that in a screen, some of you are probably doing it now. I know I do, and no, no judgment, but there's a huge temptation to do other work. This is where our email lives. This is where that document is that we've got to finish. It's just super strong versus in person. Not as hard. You can make people put that stuff away. So remember that. And then the last one for virtual, people tend to overinvite, especially these days when a lot of work is being done virtually. You don't want anybody to miss out on anything. The problem is that if you have a bunch of nonparticipants that really aren't actively helping out, it's just a waste of their time. And then the people who are participating are wondering why all these people are turning their cameras off or not saying anything. My recommendation is just invite the people who are needing to be there. And if somebody's coming in, like we had a COO join a few of our sessions that we did for a company because he wanted to understand the business better, that's great. But he said upfront, I'm just observing today. I'm going to actually turn my camera off for that reason so that you guys don't feel like I'm being judgy about what you're saying, but I really want to learn. So be clear if somebody's doing that. OK, and I said this before, but if you don't get done, you know, follow up and schedule before you finish. 5 minutes left, guys. We're just gonna schedule a follow-up. OK, so there are some pros and cons to virtual and in-person, so I'll go through those briefly. In person, you certainly have richer context. You know, you can talk to people offline, you see their full expressions. It takes much more effort virtually. People are on my side screen and I'm the one sharing the whiteboard. So if I want to see what you look like when I'm talking, I have to look over to the side and that's distracting. You in person, you can knock it out in a couple of days, right? It might be a couple of long days, but you're done. Virtually, like I already said, you have to find time and space it out over more days. So the overall duration does take longer. In person, you get a lot of interpersonal connection, and that's fun. You go out, you know, to get your snack together, or you go for a quick outside walk, get some sunshine. Obviously, you're not able to do that with another person when you're all virtual. So less opportunity for that. On the flip side, in person, you have to have those physical things. If you show up and you forgot, you know, the butcher paper, then you're putting the stickies on the wall and they're falling down. I mean, that's just not helpful. So you have to maintain that stuff. Whereas in a virtual environment, this stuff is always there for you. Those tools are, you know, they're, they're not free, but they're available and unlimited. And then in person, you have to be local, or you have to travel to get there to do it all in person. So, you know, that's harder and sometimes takes longer. And virtually you can be anywhere and you can still do it together. Then the thing I said before about the transcribing, if you're in person and using paper products, you have to transcribe, especially that future state. Your whole parking lot has to get digitally done later. Versus if you're virtual, it's, you know, that's just the way you've done it the first time. So it's easier to document, which leads me to our pro tip, which is to consider using some of these virtual process mapping tools even when you're in person. We've had a lot of success. We've always put the spreadsheet stuff for the scribe. They just type it in while it's happening. So nobody has to go document that stuff later. But now we'll even do our future state, or even sometimes the current state. In Miro projecting the screen with everybody there in person, and then you've got that done. So that's kind of nice. All right, I'm trying to keep you guys on track and give some time for questions. So here are our prime takeaways. Again, prepare your tools, whichever environment you're going to use. Think about those questions about collaboration and where it's going to be used later. Prepare that ahead of time. Have your backup files, your lists, and your templates ready to fill out. So that when you get into the session, there's no wasted time or effort getting that ready. Don't skip the scribe role. People are so tempted to skip the scribe role. They want to assign somebody who's part of the meeting to scribe. I hope I have described why that is very challenging. I highly recommend somebody scribe that is not part of the mapping. Maintain focused sessions with breaks, even more in person— or excuse me, important virtually. Let people know this is a 3-hour session, guys. I'm going to give you a 15-minute break in the middle, so save your emails. Okay, I promise I'll give it to you and do it. And then, like I said before, use those virtual tools even when you're in person. They can really save quite a bit of time on the back end and help you out with moving forward quickly. But the biggest takeaway, the very biggest one, is there are so many benefits to process mapping with a team, so many benefits to your organization with that awareness and that buy-in and that overcoming resistance to change and moving things forward that My biggest takeaway is just process map anyway. It's probably not going to be perfect the first time, but you can continuously improve that as well. All right, I zoomed through that. Any process mapping tools available within Zoom? Well, you can obviously share your screen in Zoom, so you can open up Miro in the background and share your screen, or any other tool. Whether Zoom itself has a tool baked in like Microsoft does, I'm not sure. Any other questions? Let's see. Oh, well, Siri seems to have an answer for me as well. That's hilarious. Any thoughts about recording? Recording the sessions if you're doing them? We've done that. I think it's fine to record. I would, of course, always ask people if they're comfortable with it being recorded. It doesn't, though, take the place of the scribe role in the session, because if you don't do it real time, then somebody's got to go back and watch, and then they're waiting through all this stuff, and then they're skipping ahead, and then they're missing things. So, Yeah, go ahead and record, but still have your scribe. All right, and thanks, you gotta go to the session. I appreciate your joining, everybody. I like Miro the best. Is that what I recommend? Honestly, we've used Lucidchart and some other things. I personally have used Miro, so I talk about it, and I personally use Whiteboard, which is so easy. If your company has something else you use, I think they're fine. I've heard Mural is also great. So I don't think it really matters what tool. For the first time though, it's super easy. Yeah, it's easy and whiteboard's even easier. Any other questions? I'm just looking in the chat. All right, well, I think I managed to get you guys out of here on time, so I really appreciate everybody joining. We've recorded this session and we'll be posting it and sending it out if you'd like to refer back. So thanks so much for your time. Appreciate it, and have a great rest of your day. Bye.