Process mapping: a plain-English guide for people who aren't consultants

A process map is a picture of how work actually flows, who touches it, in what order, with what waiting in between. Its purpose is not documentation. Its purpose is to make the waste visible to people who have stopped noticing it.

Map what happens today, including the workarounds, the spreadsheet nobody admits to, and the step where things sit in an inbox for two days. Then, and only then, draw the future state.

Teams that skip straight to the future state end up designing improvements for a process that doesn't exist, and are baffled when nothing improves.

A swimlane is a horizontal band for one role, team or system. Every activity sits in the lane of whoever performs it. The value is in the crossings: each time an arrow leaves one lane and enters another, you have a handover, and handovers are where delay, error and lost accountability live.

Keep it to five to eight lanes. More than that and nobody can read it; fewer and you have hidden the handovers you were trying to expose.

One activity box should be one meaningful chunk of work by one role, "credit check performed", not "open screen, type name, press enter". If a step's duration is not worth measuring, it is not worth a box. A typical useful map is 15 to 40 activities.

1. Mapping the policy, not the practice. Ask the people who do the work, not the people who wrote the procedure.
2. No time data. A map without touch time and wait time can't show you a bottleneck; it's just a diagram.
3. Hiding the rework loops. The arrows that go backwards are the most valuable lines on the page.
4. Too much detail. A 200-box map gets printed, admired, and never used again.
5. No owner per lane. If nobody's name is against a lane, nothing in that lane will change.

Once it's drawn, walk the map looking for:

• Waiting, the gap between one step ending and the next starting. Usually the single largest chunk of elapsed time.
• Handovers, count the lane crossings; each one is a chance to drop the work.
• Inspection, checking steps that exist because an earlier step isn't trusted.
• Rework, every backwards arrow, with the percentage of cases that take it.

In most office processes, touch time is under 10% of elapsed time. If your map says otherwise, you have probably not captured the waiting.