Some clients realize the need to document their processes and figure out their customer strategy, but they simply do not have the human resources to do it at this time. In such cases, they hire our consultants to work with their employees to document their business processes for them. Documenting your business processes takes time and the more you put into it, the more you get out. We start the process by asking your employees how they do something today. The first phase of process documentation is concerned with the actual state of how something is done presently. It is necessary to resist the urge to start to improve the process at this stage – you want to record how things are currently done, before you try to start optimizing the processes. After everything is documented, you can look at getting efficiencies out of a process. Our consultants play the devil’s advocate by asking tough questions; for example, why something is done a certain way, or why are you meeting so many times to make a decision. The responses we get are varied, from, “we have always done it this way”, to “we don’t know” or “you are right, we should look into that”. In our experience, almost every process can be improved and we have always seen efficiencies as a result of process documentation. We refer to this phase as the process improvement phase. After this, comes the process management phase, where you ensure that your overall processes are running smoothly, that you have the latest documents, forms, or work instructions attached to the process steps and that employees are using the WebModel most effectively.
