Creating a Process Map from Scratch

A whiteboard is where your process map will be drawn, rubbed out, edited, scrapped and perfected. It's essential you have one big enough to draw on in a room that can hold a team of people.

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It's best to write process components on stick notes because they can easily be moved around the board and then pen lines can be drawn (and rubbed out) between them.

If you'd prefer a digital version of the above for remote teams, you can try something like Realtime Board — a collaboration tool for teams that also includes virtual post-its.

The best free multi-platform dedicated process mapping tool is yED. Perhaps your organization has installed something like Microsoft Visio, but if not, yED is well worth checking out, as Ian James explains.

To map a process, you need to understand it.

Arrange a meeting with those who execute the process to be mapped, and make sure they're free either to be in the room with the whiteboard, or have accounts on a whiteboard tool's site.

Use Google Calendar to send the invite or arrange it automatically with a tool like x.ai — an AI for scheduling your meetings.

To understand the process, you first need to understand a few things...

Ask these questions on the whole, and for each sequential step.

Don't worry about anything other than getting a rough draft of the map down. It's not time to refine or optimize, just sketch.

Using simple flow chart notation, sketch the process "as is" on the whiteboard.

It'll probably end up looking a little bit like this:

Once you have a sketch, it's time to optimize the process map. What can be done differently?

Either use this separate optimization process, or follow the steps in this task.

Make sure you have a version of the map everyone is happy with, and you have cut non-essential steps from the original, if there were any.

Now you've done the collaborative task of whiteboarding the process, it's time to create a digital version.

yEd is a free and powerful alternative to some of the popular and costly solutions. Depending on your business' regulations or your preferences you may want to create the final map in compliance with BPMN, or may not.

Attach a link or a screenshot of the digital process map (or both!) to the form fields below. In the next task (which is an approval task), the manager of the executing team will give it a final review, and either approve, or reject, or reject the digital process map with comments.

The executing team's manager has been applied to the approval task via role assignments, though it's also possible to assign the appropriate manager manually.

Now that the manager has had the chance to look, give it to the rest of the executing team to use and ask them to report back any problems with its usability, or report if they find themselves skipping over sections. Is it too simple? Is it too verbose?

Take their feedback, and refine the map even further.