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 Visual Representation: Out of date or missing documentation, staff asking for help all of the time. 2.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why process mapping is a process, and not an instant fix When it comes to process mapping, people tend to go into it with a lot of different expectations. It’s not a typical business practice for many, and so you might not be sure what it will look like, how it will work or what it will do. Most of the time these assumptions aren’t a problem, and in fact they can sometimes help us shape the workshops and really get into the detail of processes. But there is one assumption that can be a problem – and that’s the idea that process mapping will be an instant fix for your business. that by mapping out your processes, you will

Knowing And Understanding Your Processes It is not at all easy to understand your business processes if you don’t know what they are. And it is nigh on impossible to improve business processes if you don’t know what they are. But what exactly is a process, and what does understanding it mean for your business? What Is A Process? When we talk about processes, there are probably a few key things that come to mind. Things like processing payroll (where the clue is in the name) or creating a product have fairly obvious processes attached to them, so are easier for you to identify and plan out. But what about the processes in your business that you might not automatically think of

Today I learned something new. I am not ‘down with the kids’ with the latest terms, but I am not part of the ‘old guard’ either. I have heard and been using the term ‘Leading Edge’ and ‘Tip of the Spear’ (sorry for the clichés but there is a point I promise) as an example of being the first in creating the standard or make a path for everything that follows. Makes sense so far? But here is the new learning, I heard someone referencing the ‘Bleeding edge’ the other day. I thought I had misheard, or they had misquoted so I asked what they meant (every day is a school day!) and they explained something that made me sit