Your five-step guide to a smooth process flow

Why Process Flow?

• It’s a sequential series of steps that, taken together, make up a given business process. It includes the specific teams that need to get involved and it uses conditional logic so that every potential situation gets accounted for.
• It’s worth noting that process flow and workflow aren’t one and the same. The former focuses on areas that directly impact a business goal, while the latter hones in on specific tasks, which may not be business-critical.

Importance of Process Flow :

• It fosters a better understanding of your processes. Having these business process flows made available—both to new hires and to more tenured employees—breeds a greater understanding of your business operations. This, in turn, leads employees to perform tasks independently and with greater efficiency.
• It improves accountability. Now that your team understands who needs to get involved, when they should get involved, and how, each of your employees can be held accountable to perform the activities they’re tasked with.
• It enables your organization to stay compliant with various legal measures. Though there’s always a chance your employees go rogue, a set of clear and discernible steps can provide the guardrails your employees need to avoid actions that put your business at risk.
• It provides an easy way to identify process improvements. Any bottlenecks or potential opportunities to up-level a process become all the more apparent once the business process diagram is laid out in front of you and your team.

Certain things keeping in mind while making Process Flow :

• Use specific markers to differentiate your steps. As covered in our example, this can take the form of process mapping symbols or colors. As long as you and your team members can ultimately reach consensus on the markers and use them consistently across your process flows, they should work just fine.
• 2. Bring process owners together. In many cases, there isn’t a single individual who can tell you each step of a process with complete accuracy. You’ll need all of the relevant stakeholders involved in order to fill any gaps and ensure that nothing is inaccurate.
• 3. Share your working draft with a colleague who’s uninvolved in producing it. One of the main goals from your process flow diagram should be that it’s easy to follow. To put this to the test, you can put your visual in front of an outsider—who’s still at your company—and see how they respond.
• 4. Agree on the level of detail that’s used. How much information do you want to provide at a given step? Do you need to explicitly outline when a process starts and when it ends? Aligning on the answers to these questions from the very beginning can help prevent issues down the line.

What is a process used for?

Here are four ways in which process flows can positively impact how you run your business:

Plan and document processes:

• Unclear processes lead to disengaged team members, low morale, and tasks that fall through the cracks. Instead, mapping out your process gives your team a better understanding of how your business processes flow. If your team members have questions about who they should reach out to or what happens next in the project, they can refer to a central source of truth they can rely on.

Standardize processes

• Process flowcharts are a great tool to standardize or streamline processes. Instead of reinventing the wheel every time you start a new project or wasting time crafting a new process flow, your team can reference the standardized process flow and stick to it. This prevents your team from missing tasks or taking unnecessary risks.

Analyze processes for optimization

• When mapping out your process flow, you may realize that there are redundancies or repetitive tasks that you can omit. You may also uncover process risks that you can communicate to your team so they’re aware of them. This will improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of your processes.

Increase your team’s accountability:

• When everyone on your team knows exactly what their tasks are and when they’re due, your process can flow without disturbances. A good process flow diagram also gives team members a clear view of any important project dependencies, resource constraints, or due dates they need to account for.

5 steps to document business process flow :

• Step 1: Select your type of diagram. Depending on the complexity of your process you can create a simple process flow diagram or pick a more complex visualization like the swimlane diagram.
• Step 2: Determine your start and end points. Indicate what actions trigger the beginning and end of your process so you can effectively communicate these stages with teammates or stakeholders.
• Step 3: Gather necessary information. Connect with your team and stakeholders to gather details and approvals needed to create your diagram. Find out what kind of deliverables are associated with each step so you can scope the time your team needs to complete their tasks.
• Step 4: Eliminate inefficiencies. Analyze your diagram to uncover any redundancies or repetitive tasks that may slow your team down or cause bottlenecks.
• Step 5: Design your diagram. Now you can design your business process or workflow diagram. Map them out in the type of diagram you chose in step one and then review it with your team and stakeholders to ensure everything is accurate.

Conclusion:

• MBG helps you simplify and streamline your processes by breaking down complicated workflows into detailed, intuitive tasks referred as process flow chart.
• We help to standardize a process to optimize efficiency, consistency, productivity, cost reduction and decision-making, whereby, a Company needs to document a process for better understanding, quality control and training of employees.