Process Mapping: Why Bother?

If you are just joining us for the first time, this is Workflow Wednesday, which is either recorded or live, depending on when you're watching it live currently. And this is where I workflow map live on camera to explain one, why workflow mapping is so awesome and important and helpful and also to demonstrate how you can improve a workflow by just looking at it and thinking intuitively. So this week's gonna be a little bit different. We're gonna get a little meta today and talk about why bother workflow mapping. And we've got a lot of stuff to cover, but I'm gonna be starting at the very beginning. Like most weeks, this conversation is gonna be based on something that happened to me this week that inspired this dialogue. So if you have any thoughts or comments, I would love to hear them in the comments. Whether you're watching the replay or live, we're gonna be going through why bother workflow mapping. And I'm gonna start with this story about product versus service. So, as you guys probably have realized, I run a service business. Many of you in the Facebook group or who follow on YouTube, you also run a service business. And I remember when I was just starting my business, I would go to a lot of networking events, which many of us do, right? We are, you know, making the rounds, trying to get ourselves known, build up that reputation, that street cred. And I met someone who's now my friend, someone who sells coffee. And I remember being so envious at these events where we'd go, we'd have your 60 second pitch or whatever and she'd say, I roast better coffee. And I would say, I help people streamline their workflows and just be incredibly jealous. How in one phrase, the stuff she did made so much more sense than what I did. Not just because it was a product and a service, partially because she was working in a very well known industry versus process streamlining. Like, come on. But I remember just really struggling with this. And I think part of the problem with that is with products, our lucky product people, you are able to actually interact with their product. You can touch, you can feel, you can appraise, you can taste. I mean, just the ability to do taste tests is something that we don't just, we don't really get to do when it comes to trying to sell our knowledge or our service or expertise or educational products. So in order to really describe a service, to explain what it is you really do, we need to somehow make it visual. Because I obviously talk a lot, right? I think I'm pretty okay at explaining complex ideas. But in 60 seconds, you don't have a lot of time to verbally explain much of anything. So as much as you could, you know, use the gift of gab and try to explain, oh, this is what I do in 60 seconds, you just run out of time far too quickly to actually make a difference. The way I see it, businesses have two pieces. They have the value prop and the business model. What I noticed when I was in these early networking events, and it's kind of still true today, is that in 60 seconds, I had enough time to explain why one of these, but not both. So one of these. If someone already knew one of these, then I would be solid. I could explain the other piece of the puzzle in 60 seconds, no problem. But if someone was unfamiliar with both parts of my business model, then I was kind of screwed. So just to explain these, in case you're not familiar with these, like strategizer terms, I don't even know if that's the original source, but a common person who uses it value prop is the solution. Like what is the problem you were solving and how those two, that customer and solution, how do they fit together? To me, that is how I understand value proposition. That is what someone would pay for. It is the problem you are solving. Usually this was something that people got sometimes, but business model is how you actually solve the problem and how you make money from solving the problem. And how do you solve that in a sustainable way that actually leads to a business, not just charitable endeavor or a freelancing hobby or something else like that. And yeah, so I really struggled with explaining my business because I found that I needed. This is terrible to say, but probably like 10 minutes to really explain both of these or 5 minutes of uninterrupted presentation to really explain both pieces of the puzzle. Whereas if you're in a product business, your business model becomes a lot clearer because there's a lot of assumptions there. And your value prop is probably something that you can demonstrate or someone can feel or taste. Whereas in service, for both of these pieces, I feel like we really need to explain in some ways. And this is where when you hear that phrase, your process is what you're selling with services. I think this is what it's rooted in, or at least this is how I view it to be rooted in. Because your process is the thing that embodies how you do both of this stuff. Your process is your business model and it also demonstrates your value proposition. But our process does us no good when it's Living where it normally lives, which is in our brain. And the only way we can get it out is by having long conversations, which I am guilty of, maybe many of you are too. When you were first starting out, trying to explain like, this is what I'm doing. It's so exciting. And Thanksgiving dinners have become, you know, glazed over eyes, saying, what are you doing? Why don't you just get a job? But what really inspired this to come back and why I'm talking about this today is because this has resurfaced in life in a Mastermind setting. So in Mastermind, if any of you are involved in one of those, you're basically being, being in a group of peer board of directors. Basically you're, you're sitting with other people who are in a similar position to you and you're saying, this is what's going on. Anyone have thoughts as to how I can overcome this piece of my business growth journey? And I really love Masterminds. I think they're super helpful. But I've noticed both last year and this year in certain masterminds, it can be really challenging to get valuable feedback about service businesses. In Masterminds, whenever you're dealing with something or a problem or an issue that relates to how you actually operate. Because once again, even though you've got these smart business owners in the room, everyone has their own intangible process in their head for how they do things. And when we're giving suggestions or advice or just trying to relate to scenarios, we're doing it based on the process that we do. So we could have someone in the Mastermind complaining, Complaining, that's a terrible way to put it. But frustrated with their onboarding process. It just feels so hard, they can't figure it out. But I'm sitting here thinking, oh, onboarding, isn't that just them filling out their checkout page? Because I sell online courses. Meanwhile, they sell some kind of very high touch corporate coaching where their onboarding involves a lot of calls, maybe an on site visit, maybe a retreat. And I've found that in Mastermind specifically, it's been challenging to get detailed feedback or detailed thoughts, even after being in a mastermind for six to 12 months. Because unless you have a way to communicate about your intangible thing that you do, which is your service, it can be really challenging to have common ground for discussion. You could try to verbally explain, no, no, no, this is what my onboarding is. But by the time you're finished the 5 minute, 5 minute talk trying to explain it, your 10 minute hot seat is up or whatever that might be. And so I this kind of resurfaced for me as a gap in how we work through our businesses. And it's something that I work on all the time. I just assume this is how things are handled. But I have to remember that outside of my little bubble of process driven, most businesses, most business services do not operate with any kind of visualization, which is just puzzling to me because if we actually had a shared visual to give feedback on, I mean, you've all been there, maybe you taken an art class. It's very hard to work off of a blank canvas. But as soon as it comes to a critique day or reviewing each other's work, man, there's tons of opinions because as soon as you have something to comment on, you're able to easily point out the things that you would do differently because there's a starting point from which to reference. So let's keep going with today. This is just, this is my soapbox for process mapping. I want to explain some of the different ways we can do this and then I want to talk about how actually let's, let's, let's, we're going to redo it. I'm going to go to talk about how things are currently done and then I'll show you some different ways that you can actually process that. If you do agree that this is a valuable way to communicate with your peers or to work with your clients. So going back to the beginning, your business story here. Almost every business training, YouTube video, blog post lives in this stage of the business systems puzzle, the to do phase. Basically you watch the video and you finish it and you think, oh great, great, 15 more things that I'm supposed to do to be a good business owner. Similarly, every new business training, if you've ever been to any of those, like start your business in 2020, I know there's a lot of them going on right now. Many people are new business owners due to the climate we're in. Many of those trainings are just 45 minute or 3 hour series of giving you to do lists because it's, you know, you just have to do these things. And what I found is when we just dictate tasks to be done and they're just this long list, like, let's just imagine the other two pieces of this are just completely blocked out. There's hard to maintain motivation and understand why do I have to do all these things in my business, whether it's just administrative stuff or whether it's setting up pieces of your system when it's just a long to do list. It is so easy to be discouraged at the 150 tasks that you need to do in order to build out your business. Knowing that you need to create an invoice and saying, why? Why does it matter if I add this memo to the footer? It just all becomes this long list of, of to dos. Whereas let's throw a process map into the mix here. When we process map first, not only do we create that visual artifact, which is what I was talking about before, we have a medium to explain the stuff that is in our brain that no one else can see, that obviously provides just some intrinsic value to get it out of our head. But besides that, once it is in that visual map, usually our process maps are covering a broader period of time. So I can speak for myself. When we are process mapping with the client, most often we're focused on the full customer journey. So from and not customer journey in that marketing like funnel kind of way, but customer journey as in customer experience. So they hear about you, they're interested in working with you two, they've worked with you, they love you. How does someone get from point A to point B? And we map that out. It's just one workflow map. But when we start taking bigger chunks of your process and putting them out in this tangible written or drawn or outlined artifact, all of a sudden when we do generate a to do list, we take all these dots and we say, all right, this needs to be done. This we already have. This we don't have yet in terms of all these touch points, maybe these templates, maybe these, these pieces of the puzzle. When we start with a map which tells us why it matters, and then we put all of those into a to do list, all of a sudden the to do list relates back to a bigger story we're trying to tell. It's like writing one chapter of the book at a time rather than just opening a blank word doc and saying, all right, this is going to be my Magn Magnus opum. Oh man, now I'm going to screw that up. But you know what I mean? Writing out an entire book just in one blank word doc. So that is another benefit to the workflow mapping piece. We give ourselves a way to communicate about it. And then when we have to start taking action and actually bringing it to life, we can relate it back to the bigger picture and perhaps it even helps us triage. Because if we say all right, rather than saying we have 150 to do's. Maybe we just want to have. Let's go in here. Maybe we just want to have this piece of the journey super streamlined. For now we'll just pick these three. Sorry, that's a little bit light. But we just want to have this part, this onboarding to be really nailed down and dialed in. Well, all of a sudden our to do list can be chunked so it feels less overwhelming where we just do a few pieces at a time. All of this relates back to getting it out of your head and having it be visual. The idea of new business trainings just telling you what boxes you need to check is laughable because this, this first part, this workflow map is your business. Now. Once you have the workflow map and you start actually creating things with it, yes, there are places to go from here. So that might be creating all your assets and putting them into a software. That's kind of what I'm trying to illustrate here, something like ClickUp that is terrible impression of their logo. And then finally documentation, which is a stage that I walk through my clients with. Like, this is our full journey. When I'm working with clients, we're going through each of these four stages and why this is so helpful rather than just the Nike, let's just do it model of business training is we have context and we're following a full story and we're actually finishing what we started. And we are defining workflows to be differentiators for us because that is what makes a service business a business are these workflows. So rather than just say, oh, I need to fix that broken link somewhere, let's take it back a step and look at how does that link fit into the full journey. And all of a sudden we know how important that is because a to do list should not have everything of equal priority. And this, I should say I've been using this as an example of maybe process mapping your service, your offer, the way you work with people. That's the revenue generating part and probably the area of workflows where people want to start with because it's the thing you're selling. However, we can follow a similar process for any piece of your operations. We're taking an action series of actions that you do, making them tangible. By making them tangible, just by the fact of being able to see them, just like I showed in the Mastermind example here, just by being able to see them, we are able to improve them, see gaps, see what's missing and use that kind of improved visual to guide our actions on improvements. To give us the kick in the butt we need to keep working on it and to build out stronger systems because we have a visual visual thing encouraging us and guiding us to know what's important or even what to focus on first. So to answer preliminarily, answer, why do this step? Why process map. That is it. Make it clear. Work on it. One thing that came up this week with a client was man, once I process map. Do I have to do this every time we improve a process? I don't think you do. So if your service ever changes, save your process map. Whether it's a page in your notebook or a lucid chart or a spreadsheet or a drawing like this, just keep it and edit it. However, if you're making just small changes to the process, you might not need to go all the way back to the beginning to repeat this whole thing. Maybe your small change can just involve changing the order of your documentation or adding one other piece to the to dos. We don't have to do a whole soup to nuts spring cleaning every time you need to change your process. In fact, you probably shouldn't. Keep it simple, keep it easy to improve. But this workflow mapping really comes in when you need to get clear. I had a client this, or I think it was a few weeks ago say that he uses workflow mapping as a tool for analysis, a tool for understanding. And I think that's a really great way to think about it is that the flowcharts themselves aren't the end state but. But it's a way to process information and see it in a different way and think through things. Whereas if you just jump to the to do list, I don't know if any of you have experienced this. When you are just in execution mode, you are just getting things done. What happens is you get the wrong things done by taking this analysis step to help you kind of prioritize and sort and connect your ideas. All of a sudden the decision of what to do first becomes very clear and very logical. You have a big surge of clients coming in. Yeah, you want to nail that onboarding first. If you have a ton of clients that are about to be offboarded, yes, offboarding is probably the place you want to start with your process improvements. So talked about why this is important. Hopefully some of this has landed. Now I want to tell you some ways that you can do it because I think a fear or at least my perception is people are not process mapping one because back here those business seminars are Telling you just, just do the things, don't worry about it. Which whole other thing, I think that's part of the problem, but the other part is just overwhelm. Where do I even start process mapping? How do I do it? Or perhaps you see me process mapping on these Wednesdays and you're thinking, wow, that would take me hours. And I've seen that there are teams that just are really slow to process in this way. What I want to say is process mapping is designed to serve a function. It's designed to help you visualize the service, the process, the actions that you take that are intangible. And it's designed to keep a record, an artifact of that thought pattern of that process and get it out on paper. That is it. Any way you can get from point A to point B, I am fully in favor of. So if that involves you drawing, if that involves you, I don't know, recording you just talking into a camera, whether it's a voice memo, whether it's you writing a writing, like a story that tells how you would work with clients, it does not really matter as long as it gets you to that point of having a visual artifact that explains the intangible things that you do. That's it. Three ways that I've seen people do this and find success in it. Actually, I'll add a fourth one on here. That is two twos. We'll add a fourth. The first one is what I show you on the these calls. Most of the time, this is how my brain works. So this is what I gravitate towards, but this is just flowcharting. Box with an action. Next box with a next action. Sometimes you'll see these boxes also break down a little bit more and it'll say something like, we'll go finer point here. You might also see these boxes have parts, and I'm not referring to the shape specifically here, but you might see people put the input and the output and then the action. But either way, you're just making a flowchart. You're showing the path that things go down. What's nice about this is it's fast, it's easy, it can be done on a napkin. Another way people like to process map to start getting things out of their head is the idea of swim lanes. And they're called swim lanes because they look like swim lanes. Just like if many of your ClickUp users, you're used to the idea of grouping by grouping data into cloud clusters. Well, swim lanes are a way that you can group the flowchart into clusters. So you might call this maybe client facing. This is front of house. Let's use that restaurant example because that's easiest. And back of house, when the client is seated, that's front of house, client facing. These could again be flowcharts. When they. Or when they're needing to be seated, they go to the front of the house, who seats them. Then they go to the place their order, that's again front of the house. And then the order goes back to the kitchen, back of house. And you're basically flowcharting, but on a grid that keeps track of where someone is or how deep someone is into your organization. You could easily replace client front and back with different terms like John, you know, John's here, John the customer, your customer avatar Mary, who's your hostess. And you only have one cook named Mo. And so that is another way to approach swimlanes, grouping by assignee, if you will. You could group by all sorts of things, but nonetheless you're doing a flowchart on kind of a grid based system with boxes and arrows. Another way to process map is to simply make a Word document and pull in that clipart icon for an arrow and do it this way. I prefer that people use PowerPoint to word if you're going to do it in this way, if you want to use it digitally. Because when you're using Word, see if that shows up. There we go. When you're using Word, it can be hard to show these kind of conditionality showing a fork in the road. But if you're using something like PowerPoint or draw or whatever you might be using, you can easily drag and drop, which makes it a lot faster. The fourth way is something called service blueprinting, where you basically have one linear line and columns, something that I like to use. And every column represents a step in the process. There's no conditionality here, no forks in the road, and you just draw a box for every thing that happens at that step in the road. So this might be you meet the hostess, the hostess seats you, you place your order. And what else is involved there? Well, we could list off what tools are involved in each step or what people are involved in each step. Again, just another way to map out the same stuff. Notice I did not say in here just write, just write a novel. Although I just said you could tell kind of a story. The purpose of process mapping is to make it make sense and to get it out of your head. The least amount of friction is what we want. Because I don't know if you guys have ever done that. But sometimes when you are trying to get things out of your head, if it takes a long time to get from your brain on piece of paper, by the time it gets to the piece of paper, it looks entirely different than what it did in your brain. And that causes friction. It makes it harder for what you write to be accurate or at least accurate to what you're thinking. And it causes self censoring because as you are thinking through things, as it takes you forever to drag the box across the page or use the clunky software, you just kind of self censor, you say, ah, skip these four steps because that's way too much work to write that in. I'm just gonna write. I'm just going to write a different path. We'll just do it. No, we'll just abbreviate this to be just the core stuff because that's way too much work to try to write it all out. Well, you get the idea. Easy is a goal of process mapping. That's really what was on my mind today. If you are joining us here, feel free to chime in with your thoughts. But the purpose behind process mapping is to create a visual artifact that helps you look at the stuff you do that's in your brain and in a visual way. It's the same reason that we create art on a canvas and not in our brain. It's the same reason you write outlines of your novel on a word doc and not in your brain. It's the same reason that we train people by having written training manuals versus having someone look over our shoulder where we do it differently every time we make things tangible so that way we can improve upon them. And if we're just kind of just doing it and in an improv style every time, it is hard to notice how you did it last time and how you'd like to add or expand or change it. I'm going to pass it over to if you have any questions or answers or ideas, please leave them in the comments below. This video Share your thoughts with me and I will see you guys next week for another workflow Wednesday on a topic to be determined by whatever interesting conversations I have this coming week for my life working in this kind of stuff. So if you guys have any topics for what would be a great, great video to cover, please do let me know. And by video I mean topic because words are hard. So we'll be back and be live in seven days. I will see you guys then. Thanks so much for watching. If you are tired of trying to piece together YouTube videos to figure out how to align your workflows, your processes and your ClickUp account, well, maybe it's time that we talk. I work one on one with a select group of clients every quarter to help people build out their systems and processes. Find out more at ProcessDriven co.