Much has been made of procedure writing, both here at Bizmanualz and around the Internet, but very little is said about an equally important part of the design and development process — procedure review.

Many problems with procedures that crop up after they’ve been implemented are traceable to inadequate or no review. Let’s say a procedure as written describes an ideal process, performed under ideal conditions (i.e., real-world conditions aren’t taken into account). If this isn’t caught in a procedure review, the end product will meet requirements only through luck. Luck being notoriously unreliable, inconsistent, and uncontrollable, you’re clearly better off with a review.

Why do you review anything? To ensure the accuracy and completeness of whatever it is you’re reviewing and to make sure everyone has the same understanding of the policy, process, or situation. In short, to ensure effective communication, which will lead you to the desired outcome.

Effective communication is a big reason why the international quality standard, ISO 9001, mandates design and development reviews (clause 7.3.4).  If you don’t review, you risk missing any number of product requirements, both stated and unstated, and you risk losing customers.

Need another reason to review policies and procedures? No one is perfect and no process is perfect. No one will write the perfect procedure the first time, every time.

Furthermore, no one — NO ONE! — can multitask. Your technical writer wears several other hats, right? That person is bound to temporarily lose focus on the policy or procedure they’re writing when other projects and other managers are continually demanding that their stuff is mission critical, “…so drop everything and work on this.” (Now, where was I?)

We all agree, then, that policies and procedures have to be reviewed, right? So, how’s it done? Well, one method that works is based on speech evaluations as done by Toastmasters. For a Toastmaster, learning how to evaluate a speech – or a written document – is as critical as learning how to give a speech or write one.

Objectives

Always start with the objectives or requirements. Were they clearly communicated to the technical writer? Did he/she understand them? Do you? Were the objectives prioritized and categorized? Were they SMART objectives?

Review

Did the technical writer achieve the stated objectives/requirements? (Have a list of the objectives in front of you as you review the document.)

Also, list some important, yet unstated, objectives. For example, correct spelling and good grammar are often taken for granted. Don’t make that mistake. Make up a checklist for often overlooked items, like “Are important terms defined?” and “Is ‘active voice’ used?”

Did the tech writer go beyond the stated objectives? For example:

The procedure mentions a packaging machine that a first-time reader may not be familiar with. The tech writer includes a long shot (photo) of the machine and a closeup of the control panel. The pictures aren’t a requirement; furthermore, they (and additional photos) push the document beyond the stated requirement of “six pages, maximum”.

Which is the SMARTer objective, user understanding or document length?

Reward

In your review, whether its written or oral, be sure to lead with those aspects of the procedure where objectives were met or exceeded. If critical objectives were not, consider possible explanations for that (the writer’s level of experience, competing projects, the amount of information provided them, clarity of the objectives, etc.).

The point is not to let the writer “off the hook” (or to find a hook to hang them on). It’s about encouraging the writer – praising what they did well and asking them to do better. Tell them, “Here’s what you did well.”

Don’t be vague or insincere, either. Don’t fish for compliments — you’re not helping them by telling them that their capitalization was great, or they had all the commas in the right places.

Be truthful, be specific, and give them something to build on.

Respond

Tell the writer exactly what you see in the procedure (ex., will the reader know who’s supposed to do what, when, and why?) Restate the objectives and indicate which were met, which were exceeded, and which weren’t met. Use a numeric scale in your review (rarely is anything “black or white”).

Beyond that, does the procedure “flow”? Did they use the PDCA model correctly? Did she or he use words, voice, style, grammar, etc., effectively? Does the story – and the message – come across clearly?

Tell them what they did well and point out specific opportunities for improvement. Hand the document back to them with another objective: you need the revision back for a “final” review by a specific date.

Remember that policy and procedure review is an integral part of a design and development process. After you’ve reviewed the document, the writer will probably have to make some changes. After the writer has revised the document, review it again.

Don’t review it to death, however. Four or more reviews of the same document should tell you that the review process has broken down…somewhere. It might be time – at least temporarily – to bring in another pair of eyes.

As a reviewer, you’re obliged to:

• Be sure that stated and unstated objectives were met;
• Be fair;
• Be consistent;
• Be thorough; and
• Point out strengths and opportunities for improvement in the document and in the process.

And as one of my favorite sports announcers (Jack Buck) used to say after every broadcast, “Thanks for your time this time. ‘Til next time — so long.”

* * * * *

For more on evaluation, see “The Three R’s of Evaluating“, by David Hobson, DTM (“Toastmasters” magazine, Nov., 2007).

The 2010 Winter Olympic Games begin in earnest tomorrow, February 13. (The overhyped, overwrought opening ceremony doesn’t count.) Alpine skiing, freestyle skiing, the biathlon, ice hockey, luge, speed skating, short-track skating, ski jumping…and that’s just the first day!

Some Olympic records – and a few world records – will be broken over the course of the next two weeks. You watch these athletes perform and you marvel at their power, their endurance, their finesse.

How do they do it? What makes them so special? Are they that different from you and me? Are they superhuman? No, not really. They’re just like you and me…well, maybe not now. But we all start out on equal footing.

The big difference? With a few exceptions, the athletes got their start fairly early in life. And almost from the day they laced up a pair of skates or strapped on skis, they had an ambitious, long-range goal – to be a pro, maybe even the next Wayne Gretzky or Herman Maier.

Mom and Dad encouraged and helped them. Their parents, and then their coaches, made up their plan. They knew that to get the big goal, these future stars had to accomplish a lot of smaller goals, and they had to do it in stepwise fashion.

The plan included competition, proper nutrition, and physical and mental training. Their coaches checked their performance in training and competitions. They analyzed the athlete’s performance, noted where they were reaching those small goals and where they weren’t, and revised the plan accordingly. Then, they executed the revised plan to improve performance.

They repeated this stepwise plan over and over until they reached their big goal, whether that was turning pro, making the Olympic team, making it to the medal round, or standing on the podium at the medal ceremony.

Think about that. They made a plan, executed it, checked their progress, and improved incrementally. What does that remind you of?

If you thought “Deming Cycle”, you’re right. Plan, do, check, and act — just like your organization should be doing (if it isn’t already). Your organization is just like that Olympic athlete. Improvement doesn’t happen overnight. It happens in stages, over time, following a plan.

Consider this: What are your goals for the short and long term? Do you have a plan to get there? Are you satisfied with your performance? More importantly, are your customers?

How do you get better? What will it take to make your firm stand out from the rest – to get to the Games, to the medal round, and maybe even the gold, silver, or bronze?

Are you monitoring and analyzing your performance in order to improve? Are you looking for overnight success, or are you looking for incremental improvement over time? Do you adjust your plan when you don’t meet your goals?

Enjoy the Games. And remember, as you’re watching the long hill jump – seeing that ski jumper glide down the ramp, pick up speed, then hurtle the length of a football pitch before touching down gently (we hope). Remember that it started with a plan…

So, what’s your favorite event at the Winter Games? Who’s your favorite athlete? Will they have to truck in snow? (Sounds like somebody had a plan.)

When we talk about helping companies obtain ISO 9001:2008 certification, people often ask us, “Why does our company need to be ISO 9001 certified?” Good question. ISO 9001 is the quality management system (QMS) standard and it produces numerous benefits for any company willing to go that route. So, why should your organization obtain ISO 9001 certification?

1. Meet Customer Requirements

Many companies want to get ISO 9001 certified just to satisfy one customer requirement. The customer states that it will only do business with vendors that are certified as ISO 9001 compliant, so to get (or keep) the business they need that certification. The problem with these companies is that they’re looking for a short-term payoff.  They see nothing but that one benefit — we need money– and ignore the long-term benefits, like “if we keep the customer well satisfied, they will want to come back again and again”.

They don’t embrace the concept of quality through continual improvement. They don’t understand that continued customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal of a QMS. In other words, these companies haven’t “bought into the program”. See, you may obtain a piece of paper (that ISO certificate) that claims ISO 9001 certification without seeing much actual quality or improvement. Focusing only on that one benefit — your immediate gain — without putting the customer in front will end up costing you much more in the long run. Hopefully, some of the quality management system ideas may rub off and eventually stick…but wouldn’t you rather have a plan than trust to luck?

2. Get More Revenue and Business from New Customers

Once you earn your ISO 9001 certification, you can advertise your quality certification and respond to requests for quotes (RFQ) from companies that make ISO 9001 certification a “must-have”. ISO 9001 certification can open up new markets you were virtually unable to do business with before your certification.

3. Improve Company and Product Quality

A quality management system standard is all about quality (really!) so, of course, one result of adopting a QMS should be an improved level of quality for the entire organization — every process, and every product. There are many definitions of “quality”, but Philip Crosby and Joseph Juran provide two of the best. Crosby defined it as “conformance to requirements”; Juran called it “fitness for use”.  A well-designed, effectively implemented ISO 9001 Quality Management System will put your company on the Road to Quality.

4. Increase Customer Satisfaction with your Products

Quality means whatever you produce will work as your customers expect. You will meet not only their stated requirements — you will meet more of their implied requirements, too.

Quality also means far fewer complaints and doing a better job of resolving those you do.  If your quality management system is working correctly, you should know what your customers expect and you should be providing it, resulting in increased customer satisfaction.

5. Describe, Understand, and Communicate Your Company Processes

The ISO 9001 QMS standard requires that you identify and describe your processes using business metrics, the purpose of which is to better manage and control your business processes.  Quality objectives form the center of your system.  Metrics are used to understand and communicate your system’s performance relative to your quality objectives.  If you make an honest attempt to conform to the requirements of ISO 9001, you’ll learn more about your business.

6. Develop a Professional Culture and Better Employee Morale

Implementing an ISO 9001 Quality Management System can empower employees. Your QMS will provide them with clear expectations (quality objectives and job descriptions), the tools to do their job (procedures and work instructions), and prompt, actionable feedback on their performance (process metrics). The result? An improved company culture and a more professional staff!

7. Improve the Consistency of Your Operations

What is consistency? Well, one way to think of it is “decreased variation”.  Reducing the variation in your processes is the definition of consistency. Is your customer better served by you supplying them with a consistent product — same dimensions, same weight, same tolerances, same output every time — or by your products being unpredictable and “all over the place”? (I hope you’re not thinking too hard on this.)

Of course, they won’t accept variation, and neither should you! And how do you decrease variation?  Increase control of your processes!  Control comes from having a clear target to shoot for (objective), collecting data on the process (metrics), and understanding how to adjust the process (procedures and work instructions) to maintain the target output.  If your ISO 9001 QMS is working, you should be increasing operational…and product…consistency.

8. Focus Management and Employees

We’ve discussed quality objectives, metrics, and procedures used within an ISO 9001 Quality Management System. Having the right objectives, metrics, and procedures, management and employees should be able to focus better on what’s important.  Yet, this isn’t always the case — it’s easy to lose focus over a period of time.

The ISO 9001 QMS has a way to ensure the company stays focused, and that’s quality auditing.  Internal audits, registration (and surveillance) audits, and self-process audits. ISO 9001 requires that the company periodically audit its quality processes. Regular process audits and as-needed audits, when done correctly, provide the objective feedback needed to correct any deviations from the quality path and keep the company focused on its goals.

9. Improve Efficiency, Reduce Waste, and Save Money

An ISO 9001 Quality Management System isn’t perfect; no process and no one is perfect.  (Why else would the standard devote a clause to “continual improvement”?) A well-run QMS does enable your company to approach perfection.  As your processes improve, become more consistent, and you achieve your target objectives with greater regularity, you will see tangible results. Your process waste will decrease, for one.

Waste is money lost forever. Waste results from poor quality and inefficiency.  Inefficiency results from variation and inconsistent processes.  Reduce variation, improve consistency, and you’ll have less waste…and more money.  It’s that simple!

10. Achieve International Quality Recognition

ISO 9001 is a worldwide standard administered by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), based in Switzerland. ISO 9001 is currently in use by close to one million organizations around the world!  It is truly a world wide standard for quality! Obtaining ISO 9001 certification puts your company in a very select group.

Why Should Your Organization Obtain ISO 9001 Certification?

Recapping the article, your company’s certification to ISO 9001 will help you:

1. Meet customer requirements;
2. Get more revenue and business from new customers;
3. Improve company and product quality;
4. Increase customer satisfaction with your products;
5. Document, understand, and communicate your company processes;
6. Develop a professional culture and better employee morale;
7. Improve the consistency of your operations;
8. Keep management and employees focused on quality;
9. Improve efficiency, reduce waste and save money; and
10. Achieve international quality recognition.

To learn more about improving your processes, attend our How to Create Well-Defined Processes Class, coming this spring to our St. Louis, Missouri, offices.

This week, I responded to an e-mail from a Bizmanualz reader who asked the simple question: How do we get to best practices faster? They wanted to know how best to use our products and services to address feedback from their sales department — that their processes are too long and, therefore, hamper sales. Bizmanualz will engage to whatever extent suits a customer’s need and budget. There are three options to choose from:

1. Buy whatever of our published products that you think you need or that we might recommend;
2. Start with our introductory process optimization services (outlined below); or
3. Buy the CEO series and contact me to buy two days of training to help you get started on your own.

Get coaching and personal service with our process review (option #2). Current pricing is shown in our shopping cart. Contact me for this service:

Review your current process. What are you doing now, and what do you want to improve? Here, we clarify your current work process so that we can measure improvement.

Compare your current process to Bizmanualz best-practice processes. No need to re-create processes when we already have them. We will update your processes to our best practices, saving you the trouble and expense of doing it yourself. Streamlined process maps are simple to understand and easy to implement.

Define the goals of your improvement and provide a roadmap for implementing change. Some example improvement goals:

1. Simplify the process so that they will be used by employees;
2. Increase the number of sales leads from the level identified in the current state; and/or
3. Increase the number of leads converting to sales or other desirable actions, such as signing up for a newsletter, obtaining a sample product, or requesting contact.

When you employ Bizmanualz to lead your improvement project, we customize a process for you from our extensive library of best-practice processes. Best practices are included. This saves you time and money on research and development. Our approach is to identify incremental improvements that involve and can be sustained by your current staff. Improvements are realistic, achievable, and sustainable so they’re achieved consistently and benefits add up fast.

Process Implementation Phase

I’ve described the process review engagement where the scope and pace of improvement is set.  Implementing the improvements is the next phase.

In the follow-on process implementation phase, Bizmanualz processes are delivered in all the formats — with the checklists and forms — that your people will use to follow through and practice the improvement. For the do-it-yourself-er, most of the process map formats and examples discussed here are described in a recent Bizmanualz article and commentary series, starting with “What is a Process Map?“.

A Bizmanualz quality consultant, with supporting quality engineers, writers, and communications professionals, will customize maps, job aids, and other tools for your project.  Read about the types of process maps and other tools we deliver on our site. The do-it-yourself-er can also read about project management tools and use them to manage their own project.

Anyone can comb through our manuals-product web site and select individual policies, procedures, and forms manuals or they can choose collections such as the CEO Company Policies and Procedures set.  Most CEO Series customers will benefit from a day or two of training and review, where we’ll introduce your employees to the books and tools in the CEO series and show them how to get started.

Contact me, Dan Davison, for more information about training to use the CEO series product.  Do you have comments? How can we help? Please write to me directly, or leave your comments below.

Thank you.

As I mentioned in another recent post, I’ve begun using the “Polls” feature of LinkedIn to gather data, however unscientifically done, that might tell me what’s going on in the minds of the Websphere’s inhabitants. It seems people love to take polls, especially when their commitment is minimal. They not only get to express an opinion (sort of), but they also get to compare themselves with other “pollees” (looked up that last word — Merriam-Webster‘s OK with it).

Many of us participate in opinion polls routinely. Polls give us validation, as well as a sense of belonging. We vote online for everything from “Who’s the most popular talk-show host?” to “What was the worst outfit at the Golden Globes?” to whether news sites should charge for their online content.

Companies shape their actions and their policies, in part, on what people say. If we’re good, we understand what our customers are saying and act accordingly; if we’re not, we come up with “new Coke”.

At Bizmanualz, we want to know your opinions. We want to know how you feel about certain issues such as policies and procedures, process improvement, lean thinking, quality, and tools and techniques associated with those concepts. My first LinkedIn question is “What’s Your Company’s ‘Acceptable Use Policy’ with respect to Twitter?

Another question I just posted is “What’s the PRIMARY Goal of Your Social Media Program?” Even if you don’t have a social media program, take the poll (we have a “don’t have one” response). Then, please come back to Bizmanualz and comment further on the question, the poll results, or about something in the realm of policies and procedures, quality, etc., that concerns you. Create your own poll on LinkedIn and share the link with us, or ask us a question and we’ll see about creating a poll for the community.

Thank you so much for your participation.  As always, best of luck.

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.

What’s in most organizations’ quality tool boxes?  Ask a quality manager and they will cite you a host of examples, such as:

• Affinity diagrams
• The balanced scorecard
• Control charts
• Ishikawa, or fishbone, diagrams
• Flowcharts
• Regression analysis
• Workflow diagrams
• House of Quality

If you ask 100 quality managers, “Which tool is most important?”, you’re liable to get considerably more than 100 answers.  A sizable percentage will probably say, “It depends”, and if you were to limit the discussion to quality tools like the ones above, that might be true.  How many quality managers do you suppose would cite “the ability to communicate” as the single most important tool?

“What we got here is…failure to communicate.”
(Captain, Road Prison 36, “Cool Hand Luke”)

Think about it.  When projects don’t work, everyone has his or her theories and opinions, most of them outwardly directed.  “They did this”, or “they didn’t do that”, or “somebody dropped the ball.”

However, if they all got together to conduct a root cause analysis, they might come to the realization that theirs was a collective failure.  Maybe they didn’t speak up, and maybe they spoke too much.  They definitely didn’t listen — 98% of communicating is listening.

They didn’t take the time to verify that everyone understood everyone else, that they were all in agreement, and that the project couldn’t go forward if they weren’t.  Effective communication is an integral part of any project’s fabric.  Of all the tools you could use to plan, develop, test, and implement a project, communication is the one tool you have to have in your toolbox, and you don’t want to keep it in the box.  You have to have it out, and you have to be using it constantly.  Other tools have their place in a project but communication’s place is every place and every moment.

When projects work, it is because communication is effective, and communication is effective when it is in continuous use.  Communication is unlike any other business tool — it won’t wear out with use.  It only gets better!  And, by communicating effectively — and continuously — you will find your projects will get better, too.

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.

Last week I took you along on a family vacation to the Eastern Shore of Lake Michigan near Muskegon. Yes, we got there. But it was a longer journey than it needed to be. We could have spent less time travelling, and more time vacationing in the cool climes of Lake Michigan. Responsibilities between driver and navigator could have been more clearly delineated. The hand-offs could have been better communicated to cut down on some of the indecision and waiting that occurred.  Sounds good but, So how do you do that?

This swim lane process map shows the passenger (customer) in the first lane. Their role is mostly to ask questions. In the second lane, the driver accepts requests for breaks from passengers, and route adjustments from the navigator, who is shown in the third row.

Asking, ‘how are we going to get from where we are to where we want to be,” is a question of implementation.  What are the concrete steps we have to take to get there?  Who is going to do what, and when are they going to do it?

Using Swim Lane process maps is one way to answer some of these questions.  We like to organize Swim Lane process maps by putting the ‘START’ on the left and the ‘END’ on the right.  It’s easier to read the chart from left to right.  Organizing the Swim Lane map and other process maps in predictable ways, and not over-stuffing your maps with information eases communications, which is mainly why you create process maps: to communicate to others a process that you already know.

What’s In A Swim Lane?

Swim Lane Diagrams, as described in part I of our series on process maps, organize tasks by role.  A role gets a swim lane. You are responsible for every task, document or decision shown in your Swim Lane.  The chart above shows three swim lanes: Passenger, Driver, and Navigator.  In our swim lane maps, we always show the customer on top.  Arguably, my daughters in the back seat are the customers of the ‘drive home from camp’ process.  If it wasn’t for the customer, my wife and I might be in Cape Cod, or Colorado, or France.  But we wouldn’t be in the minivan in Michigan.  To determine who goes in the top lane of your Swim Lane map, use the “but for” test.  ‘But for my daughters, I would not be driving five hundred miles north to a very small town in Michigan.  The process would not be taking place.

How Swim Lane Maps Help

What really stands out in this Swim Lane map is that Driving and Navigation are in fact different roles.  Had we consulted a Swim Lane map before our trip, we would have clearly seen that the driver should not be attempting to navigate,  no more than the navigator should be grabbing the wheel and driving.  The roles are clearly distinct.  Swim Lane Maps visually communicate how the roles relate to and communicate with one another.

Swim Lane Maps keep you within the bounds of your role while defining hand-offs of control and information.

Customer Involvement Shows Up In A Swim Lane Map

Swim Lane Maps visually communicate the involvement of each role, the Customer role for example.  As in the example above from my family road trip, my daughters asks of the process, ‘are we there yet?’ and interrupts the process when it is, ‘time for a break.’ But my daughters are passengers, and not responsible for any process steps (rectangular boxes).  In simple processes, customers may provide information at the beginning of a process in the form of requirements, and at the end when they buy the product.  In more complex products, customer requirements may be injected more frequently. In the case of co-development or co-creation of products, customers may have responsibility for processes and therefore process steps would appear in their swim lanes.

ISO-certified organizations must gather requirements from customers. That could be shown as a requirements document, depicted in a process map as a process step box with a wavy bottom. Customer requirements could also stand alone in a separate requirements definition process.

In a Swim Lane Map, handoffs of control and information appear as vertical lines or arrows originating from an activity in one role and connecting to an activity in another. When my daughter asks, “Are we there yet?”, it shows up as a vertical line leading from a decision point. The answer produces different actions, which is another indicator that this role is a customer.