To some, there’s an enormous difference between expectations and objectives. Our expectations are based on such factors as “the social contract”, our knowledge, and our personal experience. Objectives are rational, exhibiting little, if any, measurable bias, and are clearly communicated.

Our expectations reflect our personal biases. Expectations are often unstated — they are somehow expected to be understood. For example, we expect that adult pedestrians will not haphazardly dart in and out of vehicular traffic. That seems like a reasonable expectation, doesn’t it? We don’t often hear or read of pedestrians being killed as they burst or wander into traffic. The car is bigger, heavier, and faster — why would anyone risk serious injury or death?

Expectations being what they are, many are not met. They are often burdened by others’ expectations. For example, you expect the businessperson on the street corner, on their cellphone while dragging a wheeled suitcase along, is going to look before crossing the street in front of your car. They, on the other hand, expect every vehicle operator to see and yield to them. Someone’s expectations will be dashed, probably both.

One thing expectations rarely are, and that is “based on empirical evidence or sound policy“. Suspicions and hunches aren’t evidence. Too often, a manager comes up with “that’s the way it’s always been done”, or “that’s the way I’ve always done it and it’s always worked.” (Always? Really? Show me the numbers that bear that out.)

“It ain’t braggin’ if you c’n back it up.“
“Dizzy” Dean

Another thing expectations never are, and that’s “communicating well with others“. The essence of a well-run company is establishing SMART objectives that everyone in the organization understands and agrees with.

If you want your expectations met, you have to state them as clearly and precisely as you can to everyone responsible for meeting them. You have to get feedback from those people so you know everyone’s on your wavelength.

“A moving target is hard to hit.“
Lucy Ricardo (“I Love Lucy”)

Do this and your expectations are no longer mere expectations — they are the company’s business objectives. Unstated expectations will always be unmet expectations.

Should your company decide to undertake a large project without assembling cross-functional teams — for example, a development and implementation project that requires a sizeable number of your staff at all levels and could take six months or more – it will greatly reduce the project’s chance of success. In other words, cross-functional teams produce results!

“Break down barriers between departments.”
from Deming’s 14 Points

We are not advocating that you “put a committee at the top of every task”, or “there has to be unanimous agreement on every detail of the project plan“.  We are saying that capable project leaders assemble capable and diverse groups of assistants and empower them.

Why? By assembling a cross-functional team, you ensure “out-of-the-box thinking.” Conventional thinking doesn’t breed the kind of change you need. In fact, conventional thinking can be dangerous to your company. Think about it:

• Does conventional wisdom ”always” work?
• Can you think of companies that no longer exist because they stayed with the status quo?

When you gather people from diverse backgrounds, departments, and levels, everyone’s thinking outside other’s boxes. Let’s say I’m in the “development box”. The people in the “accounting box” and the “marketing box” are outside my box, and vice versa. We’re bringing a fresh perspective to each other, thereby strengthening the project and assuring better results. It’s similar to what Mendel discovered over a hundred years ago about cross-pollination — the result is a hybrid more robust than its parents.

Everyone’s opinions have some merit. Anyone who’s been with your company for a couple of years or more probably knows your business well enough that their observations and opinions have validity.

Those who stay in their boxes — companies that get the same teams together every time to think over important stuff and don’t reach into the employee pool for new, fresh ideas and thinking — are handicapping their efforts. They can barely see to the top of their boxes, let alone see what’s outside.

Leaders have the necessary forward vision to see the immense benefits their organization gains by using cross-functional teams. How often do you use cross-functional teams?

* * * * * * *

Recommended Reading:

• McCafferty, Dennis, “What Your CFO Is Not Telling You”, CIO Insight (Sept. 20, 2010),  http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Business-Intelligence/What-Your-CFO-Is-Not-Telling-You-802981/

We received an inquiry recently on our process implementation page, where we ask: ‘How do you train and communicate with your team?’ A reader from a large school district wrote in using one of our new ‘Talkback‘ links saying that their district is in the midst of many changes. The district faces many communications and training challenges, especially when introducing new information technology for employees. The reader went on to ask, ‘How do large companies communicate and prepare training for organizational change or implementation?’

Will Employees Skip Training When A Customer Calls?

Though a school district may be an extreme example, it shares practical challenges similar to many geographically dispersed organizations where employees work independently. Teachers may work at dozens of locations. Culturally, teachers work independently most of the time and are highly self-directed. Every teacher answers to many customers–classroom parents–to whom they must be responsive. Daily schedules are rigid, driven by the defined length and periods of the school day. Non-class in-service training and meeting time is scheduled long in advance.

Any organization with a distributed workforce that works directly with customers faces similar training challenges. Does your workforce travel? Do your employees manage customer relationships in the field? Would your field employees skip training if a customer calls? Think: field sales, field service, field engineering, route delivery. For many such organizations, in-person group training is probably not practical.

 If training Is Not Practical, What Do You Do?

But training is still essential. For example, your route sales and delivery professionals across the Americas require training on a new ordering system. As in the case of teachers in a school district, their workdays are prescribed by customer’s strict time constraints. Any time available for training needs to be measured in tens of minutes. Further complicating matters, every employee’s availability is different.  And by the nature of their work and work culture, they operate independently.

Clearly, building a training program based on inflexible, one-size-fits all classroom training isn’t going work. But self-paced user-driven independently administered training would work. So video content was developed in three to 10-minute bites that employees could access at any time. The information was organized so that students could approach the training either sequentially, or as needed during the day.  Materials and delivery were customized to work with the limited mobile bandwidth and small screens employees had.

A technology partner configured an on-line “campus” web site, complete with quizzes and completion-tracking built in so that the corporation knew who had been exposed to the material, and had demonstrated proficiency. Compliance metrics helped the company roll-out new features and capabilities at times when metrics indicted likely acceptance by workers.

Do You Have a Distributed Training Challenge?

If your corporation, school district or other organization employs independent workers and you are budgeting for a training solution, contact Bizmanualz for a demonstration. While the content can be custom-developed for your organization, you will benefit by sharing the on-line infrastructure, which today is hosting proprietary video training for several large, distributed organizations.

With an understanding of your needs, your content can be developed and hosted in an on-line campus customized for you. Just as Bizmanualz has the largest library of pre-written policies and procedures, we can provide an existing on-line campus so that you don’t have to re-create the wheel.

Call us at (314) 863-5079 x18, e-mail Sales@bizmanualz.com or use the ‘Talkback’ dialog on our Training and Roll-Out page.

Simplifying procedures is a great way to save money and at the same time prepare for growth. By simplifying your procedures, you can cut waste with confidence that you are not cutting essential value-added services customers want to buy. Simplifying procedures prepares your company for growth because it streamlines your operations, documents them, and thus makes it much easier to replicate your operations at another location.

A new operation based on proven procedures is easier to manage because you can evaluate its performance against known metrics. And should the metrics indicate a need for adjustments-typical when rolling out a new location-staff will have procedures in place to affect needed changes. This significantly reduces the risk of opening a new location.

If you want to learn more about how you can save money and prepare for growth, check out our consulting pages. We can help you simplify procedures faster and more efficiently than you can do it yourself because we are continuously writing, publishing, deploying and updating policies and procedures. Our latest procedures represent lessons learned by our thousands of world-wide customers. Developed according to international ISO standards, Bizmanualz procedures move you further, faster. Save time. Why reinvent the wheel?

Check out our consulting pages. Or call me right now. Bizmanualz can help you save money and grow today. Contact: Dan Davison, Vice President Sales & Marketing, Bizmanualz, Inc. tel. (314) 863-5079 x23, Dan@Bizmanualz.com.

Among the top ten reasons that managers give for why their company’s policies and procedures don’t work is that “Employees don’t use them.” When procedures aren’t used, you may wonder why you bothered writing them. Did you waste your time? When procedures are written but not used, lessons that have been learned are forgotten. Mistakes that were corrected on paper long ago are made over and over again. Continuous improvement gives way to continuing problems and waste.

Waste costs money.  Yet, when organizations don’t follow their own core procedures, it’s hard for them to know what works and what doesn’t, so improvement evades them. They risk quality problems and customer disappointment. Customers may defect to competitors. Revenue may suffer.

When even core procedures are not used, you risk not complying with health, safety, and environmental regulations. That can endanger employees and gain unfavorable notice from auditors and regulators, further distracting you from using best practices and making continuous improvements.

Why aren’t your policies and procedures used?

When we hear employees say that procedures are getting in their way rather than helping, we usually find that procedures are too numerous, too long, poorly written, hard to follow, and/or hopelessly complex.  Writing and development problems are the chief reason that policies and procedures suffer such deficiencies. (See our web site for several articles explaining how to avoid and overcome procedure writing and development problems.)

How Bizmanualz Estimates Your Policies and Procedures Project

When companies come to Bizmanualz with poorly written policies and procedures, we typically recommend reducing and simplifying what they have today. Typically, we can cut from 30% to 60% of their documentation load, reducing the cost and complexity which at the same time lessens employees’ objections.

We can recommend an approach for your policies and procedures improvement project based on your answers to the following questions:

• How many procedures do you have today within the scope of the improvement project?
• Send us two or three sample procedures in MS WORD or PDF format. Let us know what format you want for the final procedures.
• What industry are you in?
• List the countries in which the procedures will be used. List each of the languages into which the procedures need to be translated (if any).
• Who is the lead regulator for your industry in each of the countries where the procedures will be used? Provide a link to the regulator’s web site and on-line regulations if available. List any other regulators that are likely to review or audit your procedures.
• Mention any quality standards that you are using or plan to use within 24 months.

Pictures and Graphics Help Bridge Cultural Gaps

If the procedures will be used in more than one country, we typically recommend replacing text with graphics, illustrations and pictures. Graphics are interpreted more consistently across cultures, which drives uniform interpretation and more consistent usage of procedures.

Page for page, graphics are more expensive to produce than written material. But a single graphic may eliminate a lot of pages of written material, mitigating the cost of development.  Most companies consider investment in graphics worth-while because:

• Procedures are used more consistently
• Compliance improves
• Injuries and work disruptions decrease.

Your Budget Considerations:

If Your Budget is Less than $10,000 US:

At budget levels less than $10,000 US, we would typically recommend training for your in-house procedure-writers on how to write more effective procedures. The training is similar to our Well-Defined Processes training, but emphasizes authoring procedures. After the training, your in-house team rather than Bizmanualz would apply the principles and update your procedures. Depending on the experience level of your procedure-writing team, more than one training event may be required.

If Your Budget is $10,000 to $30,000:

At budget levels above $10,000, Bizmanualz relieves your team from the production responsibilities, and provides the man-hours and expertise to update your procedures more quickly than most companies can train and do it on their own. At budget levels in this range, Bizmanualz:

• Evaluates the content and format of each of your existing procedures within the scope of the project
• Provides you with our written critique
• Provides a visual storyboard outlining the specific changes
• Drafts the procedures for your review
• Completes the graphics and reviews them with you
• Provides one revision to text and graphics, incorporates your comments
• Completes and delivers the procedures.

Projects above $30,000 are larger projects in scope; they might require deployment in more than one location, translation, optimization, or a lot of information graphics.

Larger projects may include procedure implementation of your procedures with your employees to make sure that they perceive value and use the procedures.  This may include additional buy-in training for your in-house procedures team on how to build and maintain support for your policies and procedures project.  You may need other communications tools such as job aids or videos that are not strictly considered procedures, but which nonetheless help workers apply the procedures consistently.   Process procedures optimization may require implementing lean, ISO or quality systems.

You can control the scope and budget of your project by:

• Controlling the number of procedures
• Working in phases, and reducing the scope of the current phase.
• Creating fewer language translations and limiting the number of geographies where the new procedures will be used.
• Using fewer graphics and more text.

If you would like Bizmanualz to estimate your policies and procedures project, please send us the information listed above under ‘How we Estimate Your Policies and Procedures Project.’ Don’t forget to send us samples of your current procedures. We will recommend an improvement approach that will increase compliance, safety and communication.

Contact: Dan Davison, Dan@bizmanualz.com, tel. (314) 863-5079 x23, Bizmanualz, Inc.

More than one son or daughter of a company founder has been coaxed into the family business in the years before dad’s retirement. Dad wants to back away from the business. “Planning for a graceful exit”, he says. “And”, he continues, “You are the heir to the company business.” Dad says that he realizes that it will take some time to transition out and transition you in.

From your corporate experience, you will bring new ideas to the family business like concepts about intellectual property and compliance. In the corporate world, key inventions, know-how, customer lists, and the like are documented, managed within information systems, and counted as assets.

Similarly, those corporations mitigated risk through auditing to compliance standards and then sustaining compliance through development of clearly written procedure manuals. Documentation was coupled with staff training which reinforced comliance with the procedures. At the corporation, decisions were arrived at in working groups, with key functions in the company agreeing on how they would support a change. New technology? Has Engineering approved the design? Has Legal protected the intellectual property? Has Marketing positioned the change in the marketplace. Has Sales introduced the concept to key customers and provided them with a beta product to evaluate? Eventually, change was adopted and enforced by the chain of command.

Arriving at the family business, you may find a troubling lack of documentation of core know-how, and a lack of internal controls and cross-checks you were accustomed to in a public company, at least since passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) law. But when you bring up lax controls with your father, he may shrug it off. You start to realize that he is the center of everything at the company. The company was built on his great invention and know-how. He personally manages all the key accounts. He watches over the books and bank balances.  He is the company’s knowledge management system. When he does delegate, it is usually to loyal, trusted staff, whom also are approaching retirement. It begins to dawn on you that your presence may be the first tangible sign of “succession planning” within the family business.

You begin to realize that the company is designed around your father. Separating the business knowledge from your father will be something like surgery. Is he even sincere about backing off? And if he is, you’re not sure that filling his central role is what’s best for the future of the company.

So you’re left with this realization: How do you capture the business processes, policies, and procedures from your father. And how do you do so without draining the personality out of the business?

Sell Progress as a Retirement Plan for Dad

So if you’re that son or daughter stepping into the family business, you probably realize by now that if you want the business to grow profitably and continue as a leader in its markets after dad leaves, he can’t remain the personification of all company know-how, relationships and control. He has to gradually entrust the essence of his company to your efforts to document policies, procedures, systems and controls. And your job, as it’s shaping up, is like a cruise director that can organize all the right get-togethers, but can’t make anyone come to them.

Deep down, you know this. Trying to fill your dad’s shoes is not the way to go. And you couldn’t do it anyway, because you’re not your dad and not one of the employees would pretend that you were.

But first things first. You sense that your first customer for this change is your dad and other family currently with hands-on control of the closely held business. You’re going to have to sell it to them on the idea of replacing personalities with process.

So, how do you sell something to your father that he never embraced? And why would employees accept any policy or process so long as your dad is still there at the center of everything? They can always just ask him, right?

There is no easy answer to this. Clearly it’s a journey of small steps for everyone. Your job will be twofold: helping employees develop and adopt policies, processes and controls that will govern their work lives; and coaxing your dad to encourage decisions to be made by consulting policies instead of him. Work with employees to develop policies and controls and they will support them. Then work with your dad to accept policies, procedures and controls as codification of his way of doing things that have made the company successful.

This is the hard work of business succession planning. You face the task of transplanting your dad’s way of doing things into the people and processes of the company. Bit by bit, the man can be separated from the company, and the company will continue to function successfully.

What Business Buyers Are Looking For

Buyers will look to see if the founder is separable from the business. Replacing the key man with policies, procedures and systems transforms the company in the eyes of potential buyers into an asset that can sustain and grow without the founder. Will sales dry up or key know-how vanish when the founder clears out of the corner office? If they will, the company can’t compete in the buyer’s mind with other buying opportunities where the intangible assets of the company have been corporatized into the documentation, policies, procedures and systems of a company.

How will buyers know? In their due diligence, buyers will look to see if the company has up-to-date procedure manuals. They will look at HR and accounting compliance and evaluate the company’s vulnerability to legal trouble should allegations of harassment, fraud or abuse arise. What is the risk that management attention and capital will be tied up in law suits, allowing competitors to pull ahead? Buyers will talk to employees and observe how decisions are made. They will observe the operation and size up the viability of the company without the founder.

Your Leadership Style Should Build on Your Strengths

If our Baby-Boomer parents counted on hard work to get ahead, we Millennials have learned that they also have to work smarter. They have learned that they don’t have to make all the decisions. Millenials built careers on the leverage of teams, systems and controls, and relied less on a personal hard-driving style like their parents did. As the next in line, your leadership style nurtures continuous improvement: You expect those closest to the work to make decisions and act on them. You have more patience for mistakes than inaction or constant checking-in with the boss. Examine your leadership style, and how you lead differently than your dad. Work to your strengths.

The Management Layer - a Mirror for Dad’s Management Style

Of course leading a transition will take some time. Will you have enough? As if you were a buyer sizing up the compnay, you should also size up the risk of challenge.

One indicator of how serious dad is about ceding management of the company, is the approach taken by his management staff in place today. They have had many years to develop patterns of work and action in response to your dad’s leadership style. Is the management independent-minded? Are they making real decisions, and acting on them? Or do they complain and shrug their shoulders about what they would like to do, but cite dad’s lack of support. Do they get in line with dad as quickly as possible?

Is the management staff fundamentally weak and simply implementing whatever dad wants, or is the management commitment there for it to work? Are they proactive and focused on meaningful change? Does every decision have to go through dad, or are there policies and procedures in place to govern decision making? In short, do managers manage or do they react to dad?

So above, in broad terms, we have laid out the challenge — can you perform the transplant surgery without cutting out the heart of the business? But we have not gotten into specifics about what you do in HR, what you do in accounting, in procurement, sales, marketing, etc. Describing development of policies and procedures in each function of the business will be addressed in a series of future articles, one per function.

Jerry Sweas contributed to this article jerry.sweas@comcast.net.

We have heard from several customers about the need for implementing ISO in their unique organizational settings.  Based on this feedback, we are currently developing an ISO QMS implementation guide with tools applicable in different business settings, including service organizations. It will augment our existing ISO 9001 QMS Procedures Manual, and will help answer questions like  ‘How do I get started?’ and ‘How do I roll out ISO in my company?’

As a publisher and professional services firm (not a manufacturer), we have seen benefits from implementing quality methods. We have clear metrics that we measure regularly and are always looking to improve our measurements or come up with better metrics. It is our belief that an implementation guide will provide practical implementation steps to organizations that want to work on their own with little or no help from consultants.

The initial release of the implementation guide, scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 2010, will include the planning, design and implementation tools we have used for our clients–and for ourselves–to become ISO-certified. We are also adding some additional tools and explanatory materials prepared specially for the implementation kit. The tool sets incorporate knowledge amassed over almost ten years of research, use, deployment at client sites, and publication of quality policies and procedures. Check out our recent article & blog series on process maps and current series on project management for more insights into what will be included in the implementation kit.

More companies will benefit from continuous improvement

ISO has helped Bizmanualz cultivate the belief and practice of continuous improvement. By using the “Plan – Do – Check – Act” methods on which most quality systems are built, we have focused on improving underlying processes and avoiding problems in the future. Our process orientation reinforces teamwork: we’re all in this together to improve the process that will create ever-better, sustainable results not only for our customers. By releasing the tools that we ourselves use  internally and for clients, we aim to help other organizations implement quality systems with equal structural support.

The ISO implementation kit will be as easy-to-use and self-explanatory as possible. To support this goal, we are developing a test program in which we will work with selected companies to test and use our implementation kit. If your organization has immediate plans to implement or improve its ISO or related quality system, please contact us through the Bizmanualz website or by commenting below this post. We will provide the implementation product at no charge for test customers in exchange for regular phone reports and occasional access to your facility so that we can learn from your use of the product.

For now I can recommend our ISO 9001 QMS Manual. While it is written from a manufacturing perspective, the principles, as well as many of the specific policies, procedures and forms, can be generalized for a service business. And it has been recently updated to conform with the ISO 9001:2008 standard.

Are you implementing a quality program at your organization? What will be your first step? How will you get started? What do you think should be in our implementation guide? Would you like to try the guide and let us know how to make it better? Leave a comment below or contact me directly at  dan@bizmanualz.com .

I recently took the ITIL®  V3 “Foundation” exam.  The test, the first on the road to being a Master ITIL practitioner, was not too hard.  A few short weeks after taking the exam, I’ll receive a nice A4 certificate and, as tradition has it, a lapel pin (Figure 1).

Fig. 1 - ITIL® V3 Lapel Pins

The greenish colored pin on the left is the one you receive on passing the ITIL Foundation exam.  The Foundation exam is the first step in the ITIL Qualification Scheme (Figure 2).  It is followed by two Intermediate exams –for Service Capability and Service Lifecycle — which are, in turn, followed by Expert and Master level designations.  (If I keep taking these tests, I could have more pins than lapels.)

Fig. 2 - ITIL v3 Qualification Scheme

The new pins are similar to the old ITIL® V2 pins but there are more of them, each with a pin color corresponding to the ITIL® V3 core book it represents.  Maybe ISO 20000 would be more popular if they gave out a free tie for becoming certified…

The swim lane and document maps that we blogged about recently are useful for describing processes.  The swim lane map showed us who was responsible for what: Dad was driving, Mom was navigating, and in this scenario our kids were the customers.

Information flow was better captured in the document map.  It identified the documents handed off at each step of the process.  It also showed when status or other information was not in document form, but was spoken.

Swim lane maps and document maps are descriptive rather than prescriptive: we use them to communicate what is happening today, not what we’d like to happen or what should be taking place.  To change the existing process, we need to map the activities at each step and critique them for the value they add to the process.  One way we can do this is with an activity map.

When It Comes to Making Changes, Start with the Small Things

Activity maps and “value stream” maps help us capture what is happening in the workplace (or, in my example, the family minivan).  Activity maps are great for identifying areas ripe for streamlining or eliminating — if the activity/process doesn’t add value, it probably doesn’t belong.

Using my family vacation example, I could call a family meeting, tape our swim lane and document maps to the dining room wall, and engage my wife and kids in a conversation about the process of driving to summer camp.  I would ask them for their opinions and insights about each process step, to identify opportunities for improvement.  (How popular this would make me!)  

We dig past generalities down to the tasks that we each perform.  We look at each task and determine what’s not necessary – see if we can skip or eliminate steps.  Would we get there faster?  Would we each let go of “non-value-added” activities?  I don’t know, but I know that an activity map could help us get the issues onto the dining room table. (Selling our analysis, conclusions, and the resulting change might require a rendered map, which I’ll cover in upcoming articles and blog posts.)

Here’s the driving process presented in an activity map:

The first row is the process step as appears in the swim lane and document maps for the “Driving” process. Second row is a tally of activities per step and the number of lean value-added steps. Next row is color-coded by responsible party. Green activities are value-added. Red represents waiting or other waste. All other activities (in white) should be reviewed for their necessity and potential improvement.

Green steps transform the product (travel) that the customer (passenger) is receiving. These steps add real or perceived value to the product, in the customer’s eyes, so they’re called “value-added” steps.  The green steps help transform the end product, whether or not the customer is aware of the transformation. 

The “check/fix car” activity (at the top of the “Drive” column) is an example.  Preventive maintenance in advance of the trip assures my customers a trouble-free trip, though they may not be informed of the oil change, tire rotation, fluid check, etc.  Other green steps – loading/unloading luggage, occasional status reports, driving — are readily apparent to my customers.

Few would argue that waiting doesn’t add value.  Any waiting “activity” (shaded in red) is a non-value-added step.  Today — “Star Trek” notwithstanding — it is impossible to arrive instantly at a destination.  Ideally, we would look to cutting “wait time”, but in our scenario it’s unavoidable.  (Dad could go faster, but the minivan and the law enforcement authorities have their limits.)  We note that some wait time is unavoidable in this case, and we proceed with the analysis.

The remaining activities (in white) will lead to further discussion and analysis.  We acknowledge that these individual activities are not what the customers are buying — they’re buying the whole experience.  But we can’t call all of them waste — some of them are necessary.

Can We Cut Activities?

In hindsight, the activity “Plan alternate route in case of trouble” could be considered waste.  We don’t know that we will run into slowdowns, detours, open drawbridges, or inaccuracies on the roadmap/TripTik.  You could cut that activity.

But we ran into all those problems.  Good thing we didn’t cut the activity. However, the activity is not value-added to my customers.  I could tout my wife’s exceptional planning skills and convert a non-value-added activity to a value-added one, in my customer’s opinion.  If road delays were rare or unlikely, I might argue for cutting that activity.  Either way, the Activity Map is the tool that helps make the conversation meaningful.

I thought a local route near Saugatuck, MI, would save us few miles and some time. I learned that you can’t always get there from here in coastal Michigan. Good thing that my navigator had a backup plan.

Getting a job done requires more than just the work.  Often times, there are inputs provided and paperwork handed over, not only before the project, but also between tasks within the project. Now, paperwork may take the form of electronic documents, or records in a database. But either way, handing off or accepting documents is often how we set the boundaries between tasks and transfer control from one party (or project step) to another.

The map used to show the flow of paperwork is one of the seven most-used process maps that we are describing in our process map series.  The document map displays visually what information you should expect to receive, and from whom. It also shows you what information you are expected to produce for someone else. For an example, let’s go back to my family vacation story. One of my usual stops before any family vacation is AAA for a TripTik. You get a custom-printed series of roadmaps showing the territory that you plan to traverse. Tall skinny pages are comb-bound into a book. The route is highlighted, usually with an orange highlighter that is easy to see in daylight and darkness.

Handing off a simple document like a highlighted road map leaves little doubt about what is intended and that control is being handed off from the navigator to the driver.

In our vacation travel example, a TripTik map page could serve as an output document from the navigator to the driver at the “provide directions” step.  Sure, after several hours on the road my wife might just tell me where to go. But she might better show me where to go. With experience, we have agreed that a highlighted TripTik removes all ambiguity between right turns and left and otherwise clarifies the navigator’s intentions.

In this small area of the swim lane map, the navigator "provide(s) directions" to the driver. The navigator is actually handing off a highlighted roadmap, or TripTik, to the driver. This hand-off shows up on the document map shown here. See the previous blog post for the full swim lane map where this example comes from.

Document Maps Help You Recognize Hand-Offs

A simple document map like this one makes it clear what documents are inputs and outputs at each process step. You can see what documents you get, and which ones you need to hand off to others.

Look at the first row labeled “Navigator.” She obtains a TripTik map and tourist brochures (received from outside the process).  The navigator executes the ‘plan route’ process step and produces a ‘highlighted route’ and ‘turn-by-turn instructions’ for the Driver. All four documents are, literally, physical documents, and thus are shown on the map.

Next, the driver uses the documents obtained from the navigator in his ‘driving’ step and produces a status report showing the current location. Notice that a parallelogram is shown instead of a document symbol, indicating that the status report is not a written document, but a spoken one in this case.

The passengers, who don’t really own any process steps, produce a break stop request as part of a pre-defined process called “break process.” That is, the break process comes from somewhere outside of the Driving process. Here, passengers produce a spoken request for a break. Again, a parallelogram is shown, indicating that no actual written document is produced.

Document maps should show all the important written documents so that you could audit your inventory of reports for compliance purposes. The document map is not a recreation of the swim lane map. Decisions and process detail can be left out. You are showing the main steps in rough order.

Document maps come in handy in quality systems like ISO 9001, which require that certain records (like product requirements) be created and maintained. Since they show the records your process creates, documents maps remind and remind process owners to generate output documents without having to name someone as the “document police.” And if you’re in the middle of the process, document maps can tell you if you have the inputs you need to do your job.