Process Identification and Improvement
If the work is getting done, you already have a process. It simply has not been written down. We document how your organization actually operates, identify where that is costing you time and money, and build the training and documentation your people will use.
Your organization runs on knowledge that lives in people rather than in documents.
Most growing companies operate this way, and for a long time it works perfectly well. People do the job the way they were taught, or the way they worked out for themselves, and the work gets done. Nobody set out to build an undocumented business.
The difficulty arrives later. Onboarding depends on who happens to be available to explain things. Nobody can point to where a process slows down, because nobody can see the whole of it. Cross-training is discussed and never quite happens. And a resignation or an extended absence removes more capability than anyone expected.
None of that requires a transformation program to address. It requires seeing clearly what you already do.
We Start With the Process You Already Have
Most consultancies open a process engagement by writing standard operating procedures. That produces a record of how leadership believes the work happens, or how it was designed to happen some years ago. It is a description of intent, and it tends to sit unread.
We work in the opposite direction. We sit with the people who perform the work and document what actually occurs, including the workarounds and informal steps that were never written anywhere. That produces a map of the real process, and the map is what makes the gaps visible.
What We Do
The work runs in five stages. Each produces something you can use before the next one begins, and each depends on the one before it. Clients occasionally arrive with the earlier stages complete, in which case we begin where the work actually is.
Process Mapping and Documentation
Interviews with the people who do the work, turned into current-state swimlane maps and written documentation of what actually happens.
Training Needs Analysis
What each role must be able to do, what they can do now, and which gaps are worth closing. The specification everything after this is built against.
SOP Development
Procedures written to that specification. Authoritative enough to settle a question, short enough that someone will open them.
Training Development
Curriculum, learning paths and materials derived from the procedures, so the two cannot drift apart. Delivered by us or handed to your trainers.
Change Management
Getting the new way adopted, and going back weeks later to establish what people are genuinely doing rather than assuming.
Alongside those, we work on the two places a process problem usually shows itself first: customer experience and journey mapping, and financial and operational analysis.
All services in detail What an engagement costs and involves
How We Work Through a Process
Every engagement follows the same shape, and it branches in two places depending on what we find when we get there.
Identify and catalogue the processes
A facilitated session with department heads that produces a complete inventory of what your organization actually does.
Map the current state
Structured sessions with the people who perform each process, capturing steps, decision points, documents, systems and handoffs.
Do documented processes already exist?
If they do, we assess and revise what is there. If not, we build from the mapping sessions.
Identify the gaps
With the real process visible, bottlenecks and points of failure become straightforward to locate and rank by what they cost.
Does the process need to change?
If it does, we design the target state before documenting. If it does not, we document it as it stands.
Define the learning opportunities
We establish what each role needs to be able to do. This determines the shape and depth of everything that follows.
Write the procedures
Scoped to what the training requires rather than to an imagined auditor.
Build and deliver the training
Built directly from the procedures, delivered to your teams, with a train-the-trainer session so the capability stays with you.
Who We Work Best With
Our engagements work best with organizations between twenty and five hundred people, and most comfortably in the fifty to one hundred range. Below twenty, the process usually still fits in one or two heads and the investment is difficult to justify. Above five hundred, you likely have an internal operations function and different requirements.
We work across industries rather than within one. Understanding your business is not a prerequisite for understanding your business process, and coming from outside your sector tends to surface assumptions that people inside it have stopped noticing.
What we do require is a client who intends to do the work. Documented process changes nothing on its own, and no consultant can substitute for the follow-through.
Our Clients
- Canfor
- City of Richmond
- Technical Safety BC
- IS Solutions
- Lahlouh
- Plascon Plastics
- Harbourside Hospitality
- DAGLabs
- Baro
- Blue Door Communications
Two years after the engagement closed, Lahlouh told us the process mapping had been one of the most valuable exercises they had ever undertaken.
Lahlouh, print and supply chain services, San Francisco Bay Area
If you could optimize one process today, which one would it be?
That answer is usually the right place to start. Tell us what it is and we will tell you honestly whether we can help, and what addressing it would involve.