Project Management and Business Process Mapping

Hopefully, every project manager has been involved at one time or another with helping their customers map their business processes. Business process maps make work flow visible, understandable, and measurable. An important consideration when mapping your business processes is to view them through the eyes of your customers.

Four steps you can take to begin Process Mapping are:

Identify Your Organization's/Project's Business Processes

What are the processes in your organization that your project will impact?
What new processes will be created once your project is implemented?
What are your customers understanding of your processes?
What are the key trigger points of your processes?

Gather required information

Who are the process owners?
What are the processes you've identified trying to accomplish?
What is the level of quality required? Risk?
What are the control points?

Documenting the Processes

What are all the steps of the processes?
What are the objectives of the processes?
What are the inputs and outputs?
What tools or techniques are applied in each process step?
Where does the process begin and end?
Who owns the process?
Who monitors the process?
How we will know it is working?

Analysis (post mapping)

Is the process efficient?
Does it make sense?
What steps are unnecessary?
Is the process in line with departmental or enterprise objectives?
Are there too many approvals or too much rework?
Are there too many delays or bottlenecks?
Is the process efficient? How do you know?
What measures will be put in place to ensure the process is as efficient as possible?

There are many opportunities for problems to occur when mapping processes, but getting started will help your organization to become more effective. Once you become good at mapping your business processes everyone in your organization will begin to understand their role in the organization, what the organization it trying to accomplish, and feel like they are part of the effort to help drive improvements and efficiencies.

There are plenty of books on the subject to help your get started. Click the link below for books that can help.

Process Mapping Books

Important Words

Important Words for the Workplace

The six most important words: "I admit I made a mistake"

The five most important words: "You did a great job."

The four most important words: "What is your opinion?

The three most important words: "If you please"

The two most important words: "Thank You"

The one most important word: "We"

The least important word: "I"
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Important Words for Relationships

The six most important words: "I admit I made a mistake"

The five most important words: "You are everything to me"

The four most important words: "How can I help?"

The three most important words: "I love you"

The two most important words: "I'm sorry"

The one most important word: "Us"

The least important word: "I"

I ran across the "Important Words for the Workplace" while browsing my hard drive. I don't know where I found it, but I thought it was very good. Below the Workplace list you will find one my Dad e-mailed me years ago regarding relationships.

I list them here because part of being a good Project Manager is building trust among your team members, and an important part of building trust is being empathetic, and letting people know you care.

Pete's Estimating Laws

Pete's Estimating Laws - A Humorous Look At Estimating

This week's posting was found at Project Connections.com. While meant to be humorous, it has many facts that need to be kept in mind when estimating your project.

1. Everything takes longer than you think (sometimes a lot longer)

2. Thinking about everything takes longer than you think

3. Project Managing and leading a project team is a FULL TIME job, and then some

4. Software Engineers are always optimistic (generally REALLY optimistic)

5. Schedules are (almost) always wrong

6. If you under-estimated an early task when you wrote the WBS (schedule), you probably under-estimated middle and later tasks. Revisit the later phases of the schedule as early as possible when you discover early phase schedule (estimate) errors

7. Business types (upper management) REALLY do use your estimates for planning. For example, head count, money, customer deliverables, shipping dates, ordering materials, scheduling manufacturing lines, advertising timing, etc. Be able to express your level of confidence on various estimates when you provide them to others

8. Initially, a good schedule estimate is 80% confidence for near term deliverables, 60-80% for long-term deliverables. Revisit the schedule and revise your estimates after the Initiation Phase (Kickoff) and again after the Design Phase to improve on these early confidence levels

9. Don’t let yourself be bullied into committing to something you cannot achieve

10. Don’t bully someone else into committing to something they cannot achieve

11. Notify “Need To Know” people AS SOON AS POSSIBLE if there is a significant problem or potential problem in meeting the schedule. Remember that there was a certain degree of optimism in the schedule originally. Note: It's an art to not over-do this

12. Let team members know that you, the project manager, expect early notification of schedule problems as a courtesy. You decide on the severity or risk of the problem and its impact to the schedule, what actions to take, and what contingencies are appropriate

13. Most people’s estimating skills improve with experience; some don’t

14. Learn your own estimating flaws and compensate for them. Then learn the flaws in your new estimations and compensate for them. Repeat continuously while employed as a project manager

15. Learn others' estimating flaws and learn to compensate for them. Mentor them on improving their flaws and then compensate for their improvements. Repeat continuously while they are on your project team

16. In some environments, some people are hedging their estimates, some people are expecting them to hedge the estimates and some people are doing neither. It’s an interesting problem to get all of them to stop this behavior and have people give honest, best-effort estimates. Laws 14 and 15 are useful for dealing with this variability while you are working to get your team members to be more honest with you. Laws 13-16 are part of the "people aspects" of the project management job - like it or not, we have to deal with these "real world effects" on the projects we manage

17. Be wary of anyone who wants 100% confidence in an estimate. 90% confidence is an exceptional human achievement for any complex task, even with extremely good data

18. Look up the word “estimate” in the dictionary. You may find it useful in a meeting