Modern businesses are built on “spaghetti-like” processes that run-in symphony to achieve desirable outcomes. So, before initiating any change program, businesses use process discovery to understand the “AS-IS” processes, including all the possible variations. But, when it’s not done right, it can result in sub-optimal process improvement or worse, wasted time and resources for getting nothing at all.
Here are three common mistakes to avoid in order to drive process discovery successfully:
1. Focusing on tasks instead of the end-to-end process
If your project discovery is limited to task or project level, you could be missing out on opportunities and that could negatively impact the business in terms of inefficient prioritization of processes due to a lack of visibility, poorly implemented discovery process, increased cost due to repetition of work and redundant resources. When discovery happens at a project level, only a portion of a process gets analyzed, providing incomplete visibility and documentation.
2. Not involving all stakeholders early in the process
For successful process discovery, it’s critical for engaging stakeholders and subject matter experts from beginning to end. After all, they hold tacit knowledge of the processes that need to be accounted for in any change program within the organization. When stakeholders are not involved early on, you miss out on a few subtle requirements that could potentially hurt the entire process discovery initiative. Since most of the processes are cross-functional, you need to identify stakeholders down to the function level to understand inter-team handovers and collaboration. When you identify stakeholders at only one function, you will miss out on the requirements other functions have. For instance, in insurance claims processing there are several handshakes among the agents, customer service representatives, underwriters, accounting team, and other internal teams. Though each team performs a certain set of tasks, the end-to-end process is a culmination of all the related tasks. So, to avoid any implementation drawbacks, stakeholders need to define discovery criteria well before the process starts.
3. Opting manual discovery approach
For enterprises, process discovery is a large-scale project. As such, hiring expensive consultants to interview team members and shadow them for several weeks to capture every activity manually can prove to be inefficient. Since business processes involve ad-hoc, non-standard, and non-documented variations, human eyes can easily miss them. Adding to this complexity is the exorbitant time and unnecessary intrusion team members need to accommodate. The interview schedules take away time that executives could be spending on building customer relationships. Even after the extensive process, businesses find that the consultant’s findings are either incomplete or inaccurate, or both. Perhaps, the processes are not mapped accurately, or the documentation is not detailed enough. Another disadvantage of the manual approach is that it can be biased and is not easily scalable. Consultants hit a roadblock after discovering all the visible processes. But the true potential of improvement lies in discovering hidden processes and optimizing them.
Unlock the true potential of process discovery with SurfaceAI
SurfaceAI provides enterprises with automated process discovery with advanced capabilities. The AI-driven solution uses proprietary computer vision algorithms and generates maps in real-time for users at lightning speed. Using empirical data, SurfaceAI eliminates human bias and errors. Our discovery approach is designed to track every activity of your team members – across processes and technologies – ensuring full visibility. Want to learn more about how to do process discovery right? Talk to our experts today.