Small Business Success Secrets: Process Mapping and Flowcharts

Business owners are great jugglers... at least most of the time.

Most of us are managing many roles and incurring a LOT OF STRESS in the process.

So how do you successfully offload projects, processes and tasks in a way that allows you to train, manage and hold your employees accountable?

And how do you do this FAST?

For starters, it is vital that you understand that your business is simply a combination of many different SYSTEMS that "in theory" should fit together seamlessly to serve your customers.  Now we all know that many times, that simply isn't the case and most small business owners that we meet with have, at best, a loose grip on the various systems within their organization.

"If you can't describe
what you are doing as
a process, you don't
know what you are
doing."
W. Edwards Deming

The by-product of a lack of "systems thinking" is stress, concern and the inevitable problem of important tasks that fall through the cracks.

What if you had an organizational system that eliminated much of that stress and built a pro-active culture within your business?

The Secret Weapon:  Process Mapping

What I have discovered within my organization is that systems and processes that aren't mapped are IMPOSSIBLE to manage.  Here are a few of the many problems that arise:

• Results usually have a high degree of variance
• It's damn near impossible to train new employees the same over and over
• Projects get delayed
• Your doctors start talking to you about stress levels, blood pressure, your heart etc

Process Mapping and Flowcharts - the basics

First you need to understand - everything should be considered a system or a process within a system.  Your entire business is simply one big system made up of many smaller systems.

You need to make sure that the entire
system made up of people, processes,
policies, key metrics, assets and
strategies work together to meet the
promise made to the customers,
employees, and owners in a repeatable
and predictable fashion.

- Rich Schefren - Strategic Profits

Where should you start mapping processes?

For me personally, I began by documenting the pieces of our business that:

1. took up large chunks of my personal time
2. had a direct influence on profitability
3. had a direct influence on customer satisfaction
4. directly impacted lead generation or new sales

That gave me a number of systems to start mapping out but my next questions were "What should these maps look like?" and "What tool should I be using to create them?".

Here is an example of a flowchart - it documents a shipping process with clear start and end points.

Here are what the various shapes represent:

• Oval - a start or stopping point
• Rectange - an action you need to take
• Diamond - a decision point.  Usually a "yes" or "no"

My advice is to start small - start with a business system that you can easily map and use to gain a clear understanding of how you want to frame a flowchart.  You can then begin to map out the systems that you have identified as "key drivers" of success.

insider tip - avoid the free tools here - I looked at and used many of them before settling on SmartDraw 2009.

While most of our blog posts are on practical marketing tips, I hope this helps you as you begin to plan for growth in 2012.

Already mapping out business processes?  Please share examples of maps you have created or tips on what you do to make the process more effective.