Paul Elson-Vining

Unlocking Business Potential Through Process Thinking

Unlocking Business Potential Through Process Thinking In a world of constant change, businesses often chase new technologies and trends, yet overlook a critical foundation: process thinking. This isn’t about drawing diagrams or documenting every step—it’s about creating clarity, alignment, and resilience across the organisation. Why Process Thinking Matters Strategic Alignment: Clear processes connect day-to-day activities to organisational goals, ensuring everyone pulls in the same direction. Risk Reduction: When processes are understood, compliance and governance become easier, reducing costly mistakes. Customer Experience: Consistent processes mean predictable outcomes, which customers value. Innovation Enablement: Streamlined operations free up time and resources for creative problem-solving. Beyond Efficiency Process thinking isn’t just about doing things faster—it’s about doing the right things well. It helps leaders

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Paul Elson-Vining

Why Business Process Mapping is the Hidden Engine of Growth

In today’s fast-paced business environment, efficiency isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a survival strategy. Yet many organisations operate with undocumented processes, siloed knowledge, and outdated workflows. This silent inefficiency costs time, money, and customer trust. The solution? Business Process Mapping. What is Business Process Mapping? At its core, process mapping is about clarity. It transforms complex workflows into visual diagrams that show how tasks, roles, and outputs connect. Using proven methodologies like the Noun-Verb approach, each activity (verb) and deliverable (noun) is clearly defined, making processes easy to understand and optimise. Why It Matters Consistency and Quality: Documented processes ensure that every team member follows the same steps, reducing errors and improving service delivery. Efficiency Gains: By identifying bottlenecks and redundancies,

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Analyst pondering a whiteboard
Paul Elson-Vining

Process Debt: The silent drag on delivery (and how to pay it down in 90 days)

If your team is talented, busy, and still missing targets, you may be carrying process debt—the accumulated cost of unclear roles, undocumented handoffs, and “we do it this way because we always have” workflows. Like technical debt in software, process debt doesn’t shout; it quietly taxes every project with delays, rework, and inconsistent customer experiences. What process debt looks like (in practice) You’re probably not doing anything “wrong.” You just haven’t codified how value flows—end‑to‑end—so people can run it consistently, measure it, and improve it. A 90‑day pay‑down playbook Days 1–30: Find it (Discovery & triage) Days 31–60: Fix it (Design for flow & ownership) Days 61–90: Embed it (Make it visible & measurable) Quick wins vs. foundational fixes Keep process debt low

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Paul Elson-Vining

Symptoms of not having a business process in place

Introduction In any organisation, having efficient and well-structured business processes is crucial for success. When these processes are absent or poorly defined, it can lead to various issues that impact productivity, customer satisfaction, and overall business performance. Let’s explore the symptoms that indicate a lack of proper business processes. 1. Chaotic Workflows Symptom: Employees often struggle to understand their roles and responsibilities. Tasks get lost or duplicated, leading to confusion and inefficiency. Visual Representation: Out of date or missing documentation, staff asking for help all of the time. 2. Inconsistent Customer Experiences Symptom: Customers receive different levels of service depending on who assists them. Lack of standardised processes leads to varying experiences. Visual Representation: Poor customer satisfaction scores, loss of sales, repeat

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Small workshop
Paul Elson-Vining

How Do I Map My Processes?

How Do I Map My Processes? We talk a lot about mapping out your processes. How important it is to do, what benefits it can bring your business and why you need to understand what your processes are if you want to develop and grow. But we haven’t talked much about how you physically map out your processes, or what’s involved in getting it all out of your head and down on paper. So today, that’s what we’re going to talk about. In particular, we want to walk you through the process of brown paper mapping – the technique we love the most when it comes to process mapping. Brown Paper Mapping Brown paper mapping is a way of drawing

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Paul Elson-Vining

How to Ruin the Implementation Of a Business Management System

A Business Management System (BMS) is a set of tools and processes that help you plan, execute, and monitor your business strategies and activities. A BMS can help you improve your efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction, as well as comply with various standards and regulations. However, implementing a BMS is not enough to achieve these benefits. You also need to ensure that your employees adopt and use the BMS effectively. Here are some tips on how to ruin adoption of a BMS in your organisation: Impose the BMS without any communication or consultation. The best way to make your employees hate the BMS is to impose it on them without any communication or consultation. You can surprise them with a

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Paul Elson-Vining

How business process management can help the emergency services

Emergency services are vital for the safety and well-being of the public. They respond to various types of emergencies, such as fires, medical emergencies, accidents, crimes, natural disasters, and terrorist attacks. However, emergency services also face many challenges, such as increasing demand, limited resources, complex coordination, high-risk situations, and public expectations. To overcome these challenges, emergency services need to adopt effective business process management (BPM) practices. BPM or Business Process Management, is a systematic approach to design, execute, monitor, and improve business processes. A business process is a set of activities that transform inputs into outputs, such as a service or a product, to achieve a specific goal. BPM aims to optimize business processes by aligning them with the strategic

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Paul Elson-Vining

How To Handle Workflow Bottlenecks In Your Business

How To Handle Workflow Bottlenecks In Your Business Imagine you’re working as an in-house graphic designer for a high-profile marketing business. Everything’s going well, and you’ve just finished up the designs for a major advertising campaign. It’s your best work, and you can’t wait to launch them to the world. Before that can happen, the development team need to take your designs and turn them into campaign emails, landing pages and marketing collateral. The problem is, they’re struggling with a backlog of other tasks, and your project comes juddering to a halt, falling further behind schedule every day you wait. Congratulations, you’ve encountered a bottleneck! Bottlenecks are very real and serious issues in businesses of all shapes and sizes, and

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Paul Elson-Vining

What is a process mapping project and how do you make it successful?

What is a process mapping project and how do you make it successful? We were recently asked a series of questions around process and thought it would be great to share. How would you define process? Put simply, we would define process as your working practices. These would be the high-level steps to produce an output. Taking this one step further, its not only the output of what you do but something that external customers would value. Typically this would be a product or service. You should also not lose sight of the fact that customers can be internal too. In this case providing an output to an internal customer will allow them to add value to the next step

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Paul Elson-Vining

Survive or Thrive

Survive or Thrive Wouldn’t we all like to work in businesses that were productive and efficient all of the time. Yes, I’m sure everyone would jump at the chance for this. To generate productivity and efficiency you first need to understand what activities form the fundamentals of what you do. All businesses want to understand where the VALUE is in their processes however, it can sometimes be difficult to identify. All business owners, department directors, project managers….the list could be endless, want to achieve the optimum performance from their staff. To do this there needs to be consistency in the approach to work. Consistency comes from process. By creating standard processes businesses are able to offer the benefits of consistent

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