Why Every Small Business Needs to Use This Method

If you're looking to improve customer experience, profitability and productivity, there's really just one exercise you need to learn. What I'm talking about is a time tested tradition of capturing what you do that stems back to the 1920s. Because this exercise is way too valuable for you to not know about, I'm going to spend this entire video giving you everything you need to know about the methods, the software, and the mistakes to avoid when it comes to, you guessed it, process mapping. Process mapping is about creating a visual diagram that outlines the series of things that you do and in what order you do them. In the days of old, process maps would actually be used to outline manufacturing processes. What are the steps we need to do to manufacture this marker? What are the steps to ship it off? We just outline each step and that would help us design an assembly line that shows things in the right order. Flash forward to today and many of us small business owners aren't in the manufacturing space. We're not creating assembly lines where people are physically packing boxes or anything like like that. But despite that, we still work in metaphoric assembly lines, meaning we have series of steps we do to achieve outcomes every single day in our business. How you invoice a client, how you have a sales call, how you produce a YouTube video. These are all things that you are doing regularly. And whether you acknowledge them or not, they have invisible assembly lines that are determining how these actions happen. What process mapping does is it gives us a structure for taking these invisible assembly lines that are in our business, these intangible things we do and make them tangible, make them visible. By creating one diagram, you can actually just steal my scope. So I'm going to be going today through somebody hears about what we do and is interested in it. In other words, they are a lead to, they're a happy former customer. That's the scope I'm going to be mapping throughout today, focusing on the service side of things. If you're stuck, feel free to map that section as well. This scope of a lead coming in and a happy customer leaving is the most common scope to choose when you're first starting out with your very first process map, because usually this is where most of the value is created in your business. Now that we have our beginning and end, we need to start filling in the steps in between to do that. We've got four symbols we get to play with. Now admittedly, if you are a hardcore process mapping, there's actually over 20 different icons and symbols you can use to diagram. But for small teams like Ours, we're just going to keep it simple. The four symbols we're going to use are a square to meet a step, a diamond to mean a decision, a rounded rectangle to mean a start or stop, and an arrow to connect things together so we can see the general direction. Once we've got this scope, we want to start asking ourselves what happens next. And every time we respond to that question, we want to add another box to our process map. This kind of rectangle is the most common shape you will see on a process map. It stands for an action, almost always starts with a verb and has a noun in it. So, for example, we have a customer arriving at the shop, we have an item being seen in the store, and we have an order form being filled in. Just remember that when you're filling in this map, you want to make sure that all of your squares have verbs and nouns together. So, for example, you might have script YouTube video, you might have film YouTube video. For all of those cases, we have a verb as the beginning and then nouns after it. You can add more details if you want, but you need that verb and noun pair to make it clear that this is an action step and not just some random descriptor. We're not writing a novel today. Just just quick bullets. By the way, if you're finding this helpful so far, do me a favor and grab the link up at the top of this page and share this video with somebody in your mastermind group. Post it on LinkedIn. Help get the message out about this lost art before process mapping is truly a lost art. All right, thanks so much. And back to the video. As we move through the process, we might eventually reach a point where things are being worked on at the same time, and we might draw that, but eventually we might go through until we hit a diamond or a fork in the road, where one of two things could happen depending on the answer to a question. In this case, the question is, was the proof approved by the customer? If yes, we move on. If no, we go through this revisions process and we kind of fork off in this path. Each diamond shape reflects a decision point, and each decision point typically has a yes and a no path. Sometimes you can make them a bit more complicated, but usually yes and no. From here, we'll keep moving through the entire process, adding each box and connecting them with arrows until eventually we arrive at the ending point, which in this case is the customer leaves happy. When you think of this entire thing as just outlining what happens next, it's pretty easy to go through. But one mistake that can happen from time to time when creating a process map is duplication. So I want to give you a quick warning on that. You'll notice how in this process we have forks in the road. In this case, we have three different forks that change our process a little bit, but they all come back to the order being paid. Rookie process mappers will sometimes have the tendency to duplicate steps where even though the order is paid and there's no difference in the process, we might find ourselves creating three duplicates of the same action. This is generally not a good practice because it makes your chart a little bit more confusing and it suggests that there are three completely different ways of doing this when frankly, there's only one way for the order to be paid. So watch out for this error and make sure that you're not duplicating yourself and ensuring that steps that all happen the same way only show up once on your process map. One thing you'll notice about this process map that you might want to steal for yourself is that I like to keep process maps, well, linear, to show everything in the order that they happen. So if two things happen at the same time, I like to show them on top of each other. If things are the preferred route of activity, I show them all in one path. If something takes us away from our preferred path forward, I like to have the path actually go backwards. So you're visually seeing the fact that up we're jumping back here, and so on. All thanks to using the practice of process mapping to make the invisible things you do visual. Especially if you practice process mapping in a group where you invite your team into a call and you work through this together, you are going to have your mind blown with what kind of realizations you discover. Just by writing down what you do, you're going to start discovering mistakes, miscommunications, unnecessary delays, wasted effort, wasted time, repeated work, double checking, double work. Things that don't need to be there that are there, things that should be there that aren't there. The number of realizations you will have just by writing this down and critically thinking about it. It's insane. And it's something that you absolutely need to experience for yourself. Now, you might be wondering, what software or tools do I need to create a process map? Well, here's the fun part. Despite what software companies are going to try to tell you in their marketing, you do not need software to process map. In fact, most of my early process mapping was done on either a whiteboard or with a pile of sticky notes in an open wall in my office. That's where I would suggest you start as well. However, because process mapping is really valuable to do in a group setting, if you are in a situation where you work remote and your team isn't in your office with you, I would suggest moving to a digital whiteboarding option instead. For a bare bones basic digital experience, you can use a tool like PowerPoint or Google Slides where you can just use the slides and drag things around as if it was a whiteboard. But if you really want the best digital experience, I would suggest using a digital whiteboard simply because in digital whiteboards you can never run out of space and you can just go on infinitely. Any whiteboard tool you use will be just fine, but my personal favorites are canva Whiteboard or Whimsical, which is what I'm showing in this video. So when do you actually create a process map? There are two common instances. One when you want to make something better and two when you want to create something new. In both of these cases, a process map can be helpful for helping you get your thoughts out on paper to identify improvements in the former case, or identify what the heck it is you're doing you in the latter case. Once you've had one of these two triggers, kick off your process mapping adventures. You want to open up a blank process map and start by defining the start and the stop. In other words, the boundaries of what you want to focus on. For example, if I really wanted to focus on improving my process of producing a YouTube video, my start might be I have an idea for a video and the end might be the video is published. That is my start and my stop. Those are my boundaries of the process I want to improve. Maybe you are a little bit more specific. Maybe your overall YouTube process doesn't need much work, but you really need help on scripting the video just this one little step. Well, for you, you might just focus then on the start of I have a video idea and then it stops when the script is done. Just by narrowing the scope, we're making our process map more detailed to really hone in on just the areas we care about. So if you have a big problem to solve, you will generally be zooming out more. If you have smaller problems you're looking to refine, you will generally zoom in more. Now that you have your process map, which is called an as is process map or current state process map, you have the option to start improving it to make a better process in the future. And the way you go about improving. It differs a little depending on what you want to improve in your business. For example, if you're looking to improve customer experience, you might choose to add on your your customer journey to this map to capture what people's emotions are at each state, what their experience is at each state. If you're looking to improve miscommunication and lack of productivity, you might look at this process map and add work streams. Add color coding to help you analyze how many times work changing hands and which department owns which part. If you're looking to improve profitability, you might choose to add things like time costs to this process map. How long does each step take and how many delays are there? How long does it take to get through this? Depending on which of these three is your goals, your next step looks a little different. So I'm going to ask for your help here. If you'd like to see a follow up video on any of these three, go ahead and leave me a vote in the comments below. We'll take whichever of these three get the most comments to produce a follow up video talking all about how to take your process map and make it even better by optimizing for one of these things. And if you want to post multiple comments, I will count that as multiple votes as we wait for those votes to come in. You can watch a more general approach to improving any process in this video right here where I have a panel of of business leaders like you. Join me live and we actually improve a process together by using a simple process map that you've already created and some sticky notes to identify operational improvements as we wait for the votes to come in. Watch that video on the end screen. I'll see you next time. Until then, enjoy the process.