Story Boarding the Business Process

Example of a Story Board

How to highlight, within an As-is presentation, areas to improve a process ready for a To-be process design

If you didn't read my previous post, have a look at: Communicating a business process

The idea behind the Story Board is to quickly introduce all the teams or roles involved in the process we are trying to define and later improve. We want the document to be something that requires little upfront introductions and allows people to quickly get a feel as to what we are trying to do.

As we introduce new slides to the process, we can colour code the images with a Green, Red or Yellow.
The boarders of Red, Green and Yellow describe slides that we have highlighted as: Green = Understood; Yellow = Need clarification; Red = Need more details.
In this example of a very simple On Boarding Process we can quickly show someone - be it Stakeholder, Manager, End-User, person walking in off the street - the process of on boarding a new person, and they should be able to follow it and understand the current process without much introduction to what they are seeing.
We can then begin the next phase of our process improvement steps by designing a To-be process once we have clarified the parts within the existing process that we don't quite understand in full.
The idea behind doing this is quite simple. We wish the As-is process to elicit further conversation amongst the people involved in the process. We want them to highlight where we have misunderstood the importance of something. Or where we have missed a vital step in the process. We also want the business to see for themselves where they are being inefficient and why we wish to improve their current process.

In the next post I'll talk about the importance of the As-is process. This is something that oft-times is misunderstood. The step of describing how they work today is vital in understanding how we can best change the behaviours of the people involved in the process.
Once we have properly defined the As-is Process, we'll want to Story Board the To-be process for similar reasons. To elicit further discussion amongst our business users to ensure that we capture all the relevant events and to ensure we cater for the majority of their business process requirements. We want as much involvement from our business users in modelling the T-be process so as to increase the likelihood of a smooth adoption to the new process.
Swim lanes and Flow Chart diagrams in Visio are good, even great. I would still be drawing those up for more detail. But their target audience is restricted to those that understand them and are often ignored by business users who have better things to do with their time. Story Boards tend to get more eyeballs watch over them and, in the end, that is what we are looking for.