The Maven Matrix Manifesto Personal Use Ebook

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The next cause that Forrester Research identified for outsourcing challenges is “The lack of a good process for specifying the work”. This is also an obstacle to getting more leverage in your business, and the reason why entrepreneurs struggle so much with systemizing their business.

One of the best ways to document the way work should be done, and how it interrelates to other activities inside your business, is by process mapping.

Edward Deming, the father of the quality movement and the man responsible for Japan’s rise after World War II said “If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” I couldn’t agree more.

The good news is that process mapping is really simple. There are only  different elements to a process map - That’s it! The oval represents the start and end so you really only use that twice. The arrows just show you the direction. So you’re left with just two symbols to use; an action symbol or a decision symbol. The beauty of this is anything that you do can be reduced down to its core using this method.

One reason why process maps are really important tools is that it makes it very easy to optimize the way you do things inside your business. The first time you do any activity inside your business it’s generally not done the best way it can be.

When you start drawing your process map, it’s really easy to see why your current way of doing an activity is less than ideal; more importantly you’ll see where it can easily be improved upon. Looking at a process in a visual way makes it’s easier to understand the flow, the interactions, and the sub-processes and sub-activities that are constraining your performance.

Listen, it’s impossible to achieve optimum performance inside your business with flawed processes. Quality experts tell us 94 percent of any breakdown inside a business is due to faulty processes, not human problems, not anything else, it’s a breakdown in a process. That’s why having a tool as powerful as process mapping is crucial to streamlining your current operation.

In my company we process map everything we do, this allows us to easily train others, to outsource functions easily, and to continually improve our overall performance. Here’s an example of a process map from my company. It’s a little outdated now, (meaning we don’t use this process anymore) but the fundamentals are here for you to learn from.

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