Are your staff swimming against the tide ?
At Be Astute we have for a long time now been using a technique called swim lane charts to describe business processes and work with organisations to create more efficient working practices….
Whats a swimlane chart and what does it look like ?
To quote the Lucid Chart tutorials;
“A swimlane diagram is a type of flowchart that delineates who does what in a process. Using the metaphor of lanes in a pool, a swimlane diagram provides clarity and accountability by placing process steps within the horizontal or vertical “swimlanes” of a particular employee, work group or department. It shows connections, communication and handoffs between these lanes, and it can serve to highlight waste, redundancy and inefficiency in a process.
This type of diagram is also known as a Rummler-Brache diagram or a cross-functional diagram (swimlanes are sometimes called functional bands). Swimlanes (also written as "swim lanes") are used as a valuable element in Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN and BPMN 2.0); its software design counterpart, Unified Modeling Language (UML); and process flow diagrams (PFDs.) Standard symbols used in all these types of diagrams, combined with the swimlanes, can provide an easy-to-read visual representation of responsibilities in a process.”
How do you create a swim lane chart ?
Pre COVID-19 Swimlane charts at Be Astute were created using good old fashioned wall paper.
We’d take a roll of wallpaper; nothing too cheap - the John Lewis sale bin is a mine of useful material; a pack of post-it stickers, a box of sharpie pens (other pen types are available) and a packet of chocolate hobnobs, then find the room with the biggest table in the building (though one occasion a floor worked better) and start to draw.
So to model a customer journey, for instance, we would looking to looking to trace the customers interactions with the client organisation through the entire sales process; and ideally include the after sales process as well..
Almost as if you were following something around the business process.
We are interested in the actors in the process - the people and systems that move the information or object around.
The transformations that take place
The activities and data involved
We are extracting information about the existing process and writing it down on the wall paper roll. The wall paper works a bit like a scroll the longer the process the more wall paper we use.
Within the wall papering session everyone gets to voice their opinion about what goes on in the process and we as analysts at Be Astute act literally as the scribe and moderator; asking questions to draw out the ins and outs of the process.
Keeping the peace and making sure that everyone gets their say; that’s really important.
Whats the Gladys Effect ?
We refer a lot to the mythical Gladys in accountants who is key to the smooth running of every business.
We find a lot that the Managing Director or Operations Director might have a view on how a process works.
But Gladys will actually know how the process works. If you write down the Managing Directors view and you are not actually getting to the truth; it may be that a process ought to work a certain way but it doesn’t and you need to understand why not. In the first instance everyone’s input is of equal value.
Generally we will run the swim lane process with a series of workshop sessions with client staff. This will extract both the swim lane information and issues that the client is facing. We are looking to identify, for want of a better way of putting it, the stupidities in the clients process. The gaps and duplication that the clients staff have to work around on a daily basis; things that cost money and reduce productivity. For fairly obvious reasons this stage in the process is often called “discovery”.
It will extract and document what we refer to as the “As Is” process, the process as its stands at that point in time with all its inefficiencies present.
This process will usually be recorded in three key artifacts;
The “As Is” swim lane diagrams; usually migrated from the wall paper to Microsoft Visio; Visio diagrams are easier to share on email than a wall paper scroll. With COVID-19 and Lockdown we have used Visio to collect the As Is model running the discovery sessions over Zoom with the analyst sharing their computer desktop running Visio. Its not as interactive as a face to face workshop but with patience it can be made to work.
A Gap analysis; a Excel sheet that list the stupidities that we have identified with an indication of the magnitude and potential benefits to be gained.
IT Audit; We have a standardised technology audit spreadsheet that we complete. This looks mostly at technology management, process and procedures, security. data protection, procurement and looks for gaps and unmitigated risks in the companies underlying technology infrastructure.
To be or not to be …
Once we believe we have the enough information about the “As Is” process we start to think about what the “To Be” process should look like.
Ideas in the As Is model (left) are incorporated into the To Be model (Right).
Once that To Be process has been reviewed with the Client management team we can start to build the road map that will transform the client organisations processes. We tend to discourage large scale changes; encouraging organisations to build a prioritised list of the incremental changes they want to make; then tackle a couple of those changes within a relatively short time frame.
We are looking to make sure the items on the road map that will either deliver the most benefit or are a dependency for the most beneficial items are completed first.
Towards the end of the first implementation cycle we will review the list of changes on the road map and confirm that the priorities are still the same before launching into the next set of changes. That prioritisation will change over time; so if an organisation spends 3 months implementing changes 1 to 5 changes a 6 to 10 may no longer be the highest priority at the end of the first implementation cycle.
The various artifacts created in the discovery phase; the gap analysis, IT road map, swim lanes and potentially a data model are maintained though out the design and implementation stages so when an organisation gets to the end of the cycle they can see where to go next.
So thats how we use swim lane diagrams at Be Astute to help organisations ensure their staff aren’t swimming against the tide....
References
https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/tutorial/swimlane-diagram
Bill Stock/2nd August 2020