Business Process Design: modeling essential process steps

Process modeling using strategic task analysis

To get a clear view of your work, production, or other processes, and get all your team members on the same page use the Business Process Design template. 

This Method, also known as BPMN or Business Process Modeling Notation, produces a graphical representation of business processes. It’s a flowchart that models the steps of a business process from end to end, and a key element of project management or business process management. 

It can be used on Board, Klaxoon's digital whiteboard, to visually represent a detailed sequence of activities and information flows required to complete a process.

As a team, identify the essential tasks to be completed during the process. In a single workshop, define both workflows and dataflows for your company or project. With your team, write down the essential regularly completed steps to achieve your goals:

• Improve the process
• Accelerate cycle times
• Improve quality 
• Reduce costs, etc.

What are the benefits of process modeling?

With the Business Process Design template, you can optimize process cycles, and reduce costs while creating cohesion. This workshop encourages all the players to focus. Above all, it considers each step of a process, which is often seen only in its entirety. At the end of the meeting, you will be able to identify unnecessary tasks or road blocks.

Moreover, this strategic analysis produces business process mapping that gives everyone a clear view, in one place, and highlights the action items in the right order.

Be it for continuous process improvement or to create a new process, you can use Klaxoon’s easily shareable whiteboard to boost productivity and potentially save time and money.

How to model a process with the Business Design Process template

First, invite to the whiteboard all team members and stakeholders associated with the process that needs to be analyzed. Start by indicating the following:

• The name of the project
• The date
• The name of the process
• Any versioning if needed

To ensure that all the participants are aligned with the goals, launch a Question attached to the process idea.

Then, ask the participants to send all the tasks that are part of the process to the ideas box. Be as clear and precise as possible (incoming, outgoing, main objective, etc.). Place ideas in the table, ranking them by their level of importance (from 1 to 4), then add more detail as a team. Put each sub-process in the correct level-associated color, and class them into Categories.

Now, all you have to do is organize the ideas to create a very clear and visual map. You have several options for aligning and arranging ideas. Choose the style of connectors for linking them, and the right direction for the arrows. Again, use the Question tool to check with the team that all the tasks have been identified. 

Once you’ve done that together, it's time to measure the process’s effectiveness and remove any unnecessary tasks.

End this workshop using the Retrospective section of your Board. Launch a Poll Question to invite everyone to share their feedback, and launch a Live Storm to identify areas of improvement for next time. All the participants have to do is double-click on the Question to respond, and the consolidated results will appear automatically.