”Process” is a term which means different things to different people. In this post, though, with ”Business Process” I am referring to a set of interrelated activities that gets initiated by a triggering event, and achieves a specific outcome for the customer and stakeholders. While not exact quotation, this directly draws from the excellent book on the topic, ”Workflow Modeling” by Alec Sharp. I cannot recommend this book enough!
What is the process discovery mentioned in the title? ”Discovery” is the right term here – it is about finding out what’s really happening. We take an expedition outside of the official map, i.e., existing process definitions, assuming those exist. We seek to find out how the terrain looks like, and whether the map matches with what we can observe. One might be surprised what kind of camps and shortcut trails are found in a forest while not shown on a map.
There are various reasons why organization would like to get into business process discovery. For instance, small company might want to formally describe how it operates, as a step towards certification. In other organization processes have already been defined but nevertheless the performance is less optimal and it’s not clear where to start the change. In such cases finding out real-life bottlenecks that have been formed outside of the official truth could help.
You cannot improve what you don’t understand. That is why the as-is business process discovery, getting to know the current, is the essential first step towards the change and carries a lot of weight. As we progress it also enables to consider things as a whole: if company’s processes were defined in information silos, they may be heavily suboptimized for local efficiency, but at the same time be kicking each other’s knees and causing much reduced net impact across the entire larger process area. Finding out what is actually going on and planning our way towards target state from there helps to prevent that from happening in future.
One particularly powerful tool in the process discovery, even in the era of AI, is quite conventional – engaging in conversations with people of the organization. In those interviews one could start with relatively simple questions like ”What’s your role?”, ”Where do the inputs for you work come from? Where do they go?” and so forth. That enables us to draw the as-is map as these sessions progress and more territory gets revealed. This map is a powerful asset when starting to talk about what we would like to build and where, what to renovate or perhaps tear down completely.
If this raises thoughts or questions, feel free to contact us at Sininen Polku. Let’s draw the map together.
Henri Heimonen
Program Director
henri.heimonen(at)sininenpolku.fi
+358 40 844 3421