Definition and purpose: transparency for everyone
Boiled down to the essentials, the process landscape — also known as a process map — is a tool for visually presenting a company's most important core and supporting processes. Its main purpose is to define organizational structures, responsibilities and workflows clearly. That not only creates transparency, it also makes collaboration easier and improves efficiency inside the company.
Better transparency in turn increases efficiency and effectiveness in the company. It also encourages and simplifies collaboration between departments.
To return to the sat nav metaphor, the process landscape acts as a kind of orientation aid for everyone in the company: on the one hand to locate and place their own processes and responsibilities, and on the other to understand how the company works in general.
Best practices for building your process landscape
Building a process landscape usually proceeds hierarchically. First, core processes are identified and depicted. Core processes are those that contribute directly to the company's value creation and in that sense form the “core” of its business activity. Production and sales processes, which relate directly to meeting customer needs, are examples here.
After the core processes come the supporting processes. These merely feed into the core processes; they are not themselves directly involved in creating value. Besides IT support, they include the company's people management and financial administration — processes that don't directly concern the company's business goals but are nevertheless essential to the core processes succeeding.
Once both types of process have been identified and placed, that information can be used to begin the graphical representation. This can take various forms; what matters above all is that it is a clear, unambiguous depiction that makes the processes and their dependencies plain.
A decisive success factor for the process landscape is involving the relevant stakeholders. Their perspectives and knowledge are indispensable for a precise and valuable depiction. Only then can the process landscape live up to its purpose as a complete and accurate representation of the company's processes. Involving the relevant stakeholders also ensures that the process landscape stays comprehensible to those same stakeholders: if it becomes overcomplicated and no longer serves the central goal of improving transparency for them, it is logically of no use.
It is also worth noting here that a company's process landscape naturally keeps changing. The map must therefore be able to respond dynamically to those changes. That means reviewing it regularly and adjusting it where needed. The same applies to incorporating feedback from users and stakeholders.
The practical value of the process landscape
So we have now learned the best practices for building and maintaining a process landscape. What exactly does it do for me in my day-to-day work?
1. Greater transparency: as we established at the start of this post, one of the biggest advantages of a process landscape is greater transparency in the company. Stakeholders can see clearly how processes interact and where responsibilities sit, which improves the general understanding of the organization.
2. Better communication: at the same time, greater transparency encourages communication between teams and departments, because misunderstandings and lost information are reduced. The process landscape establishes a “common language” inside the company, which avoids misunderstandings and improves communication.
3. Continuous improvement: the clear structures of the process landscape make it easier to identify redundancies or ineffective steps in processes, which can then be eliminated or redesigned. In that sense the process landscape — which should be reviewed regularly for the sake of ongoing improvement — encourages better workflows across the company.
4. Risk management and compliance: besides errors and shortcomings, risks can also be located more easily. At the same time, orderly documentation of every process helps meet regulatory requirements — so the process landscape supports compliance too.
5. Easier training and onboarding: as a starting point for new employees, the process landscape makes orientation and getting up to speed easier, which makes it an important part of onboarding in particular.
In summary: a versatile tool
In short, a well-built process landscape is an invaluable help to any company. It encourages transparency, improves communication, enables continuous improvement of workflows and helps meet regulatory requirements. At the same time it makes onboarding easier for new employees and strengthens risk management. A regularly updated process landscape can thereby contribute considerably to better efficiency and effectiveness inside the company.
Would you like to take your own process management to the next level right now? Then start your free trial of aiio today and see for yourself how easy it can be to build a detailed process landscape for your company — and a good deal more besides.