6. What We’ll Cover
• New Offices, Old Processes
• What Is Business Process Mapping?
• How Does Process Mapping Work?
• Getting Started
• Panel Discussion
8. The Move Downtown
LAF had neighborhood
offices scattered throughout
the city. It decided that, to
be more efficient, it had to
consolidate into one
downtown office.
9. Client Intake Became Less Efficient
At the new office, the lines were long and moved slowly. The
process became unwieldy and frustrating.
10. The Process Needed to Change
LAF decided it needed
to undertake business
process mapping.
12. Mapping Is Part of Process Improvement
Choose the
process you
want to
improve
Gather
stakeholder
input
Document the
process
visually
(mapping)
Analyze and
find areas to
improve
Make changes
Evaluate and
continue to
tweak
14. You Can Increase Efficiency
The visual format
reveals redundancy
and bottlenecks.
15. You Can Improve Service
It can help you see areas
of confusion or frustration
for your clients and can
reveal opportunities to offer
more value.
16. It Can Help You Standardize Processes
• Use it for repetitive
processes.
• You’ll make it easier
for new staff and
volunteers to learn.
• Standardization can
improve quality.
17. But Have Realistic Expectations
Mapping alone won’t
improve things. It’s just
one step in process
improvement.
23. A Few Tips
• Answer who, what,
how, and why.
• Walk through the
actual process.
24. If You Want to Get Fancy
• Use shapes for
different kinds of
steps, e.g. diamond
for decision point.
• Add swim lanes.
• Convert to a digital
flow chart.
25. Keep going
Find quick wins, then
move to deeper analysis.
Remember to implement
and evaluate your
changes.
Project management webinar – recording
Course on producing webinars starts July 21
3 tech decisions
Legal aid experience
Vivian Hessel, the Director of Technology for Advocates at LAF, is responsible for cultivating the use of technology at LAF, managing agency-wide technology projects and interfacing between the IT Pros and LAF staff. Prior to assuming this position, Vivian worked as a supervisory attorney in one of LAF’s neighborhood offices where she spent her days managing staff, triaging emergencies and parsing out limited resources. In her spare time, she acts as a client, consultant and carpenter for her husband’s home improvement projects, challenges her eleven-year-old daughter to math trivia games and plays hide-and-seek with her six-year-old twins.
Susan Zielke is the Managing Attorney of the Eastern Regional Office (Champaign, Illinois) of Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance. She has been with Land of Lincoln for 19 years, and been involved in a variety of strategic planning and program-wide projects. She was involved with Land of Lincoln’s business process analysis engagement with Seyfarth Lean around intake and substantive law areas, and has led the charge in following up with the project after its initial phases. She has spoken about BPA and Land of Lincoln’s experience at ABA/IOLTA conferences in Chicago and San Diego, at state-wide events in Illinois, and most recently at the Pennsylvania Legal Aid Network’s Technology Conference in June 2016.
Description: “Business mapping is looking at the organization through the lens of a workflow of inputs and outputs. Mapping has four main steps, understanding the steps, understanding the goals and risks, understanding what the people in the process think, and finally analyzing all the data gathered. The end result is a chart that captures all the processes and highlights things like idle time or unnecessary repetitive work and suggests a course of action to fix them.”
This is a made up story, loosely based on a real case.
Even though there were multiple intake staff
Process that worked okay before didn’t work as well anymore
And they didn’t all do it the same way
Have you experienced this?
Chat: What’s a process in need of improvement in your org?
You might have heard of Six Sigma…it’s not just manufacturing assembly lines that can benefit
When you see everything laid out visually it’s easier to spot the inefficiencies or maybe even find shortcuts
Maybe you’ve also heard of user centered design –
Each staff member involved knows what they have to do and why, but might not understand how the whole experience feels to a client.
Like in the example of Legal Assistance Foundation – they consolidated offices and found out the intake processes were all different.
Mapping standardizes but also defines the areas where people SHOULD use judgment and where they are empowered to make decisions.
After this webinar you’ll choose a process to map. But don’t stop there, because mapping isn’t enough to change anything. Talk about it, revise it, and so on. Remember process improvement isn’t magical, it’s hard work, and you’ll encounter resistance to change.
survey, focus group, interview
(Your first process probably won’t be this complex.)
Go from left to right. Use colors if you want, to indicate who is responsible including when it’s a system doing that step, like your payment gateway processing a credit card and sending back confirmation.
Here’s a simple process with one branching point that leads to different actions: making my son’s lunch for day camp.
This process takes FOREVER.
Chat: How might mapping it help us discover ways to improve it?
*Deciding took 75% of the time and many hidden steps. Consolidated all decisions to Sunday night – weekly menu.
Another example, this one from LAF.
Note the documents linked.
Indicates who does what.
Branch at 2nd level – received funds or not?
Who does this step? Who else is present or involved?
What exactly do they do?
What tools do they use, where do they do it, how fast, what is the quality measure? That is all part of How.
Why – what is the desired outcome, what is the trigger?
Walking through it is a way to test that you have it documented accurately.
Animation: click to show comments
Swim lanes & colors indicate who is responsible (or what tech system).
Arrows show the flow.
Important: don’t forget the people the process is being done to
Also external partners such as agencies you refer to
That’s a good way to get people excited about process improvement – do something that makes their lives a little better.
“Mail the document” is a more useful level of detail than “get out an envelope, fold the document, insert it into the envelope, seal the envelope, attach the stamp”.
Susan said, don’t choose to ignore the naysayer – doing so can cause all kinds of trouble for the process and any hope of improvements.
Another key mistake to avoid in our legal aid world is to not have someone with the authority to keep the process moving – a project manager who actually has authority to call people to action and hold their feet to the fire. It is too easy to get distracted by the next emergency – or the next project.
Introductions (skip back to profile slides)
Panelist questions:
1. How much time does this require?
2. Example of a quick win you found after mapping a process.
3. Favorite questions to ask in voice of client and mapping process.
4. What’s an example of an unreasonable goal to have for process improvement?
5. What was the toughest process you had to tackle.
6. What’s the one thing you want people to take away? There are always naysayers who think this won’t be valuable, but they can be won over if you engage them and listen to them.