Mapping Processes for Business Communication, Compliance, and Quality

"If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you are doing" - W.Edwards Deming

This tutorial is aimed at Business professionals who are working in information management roles. The objective of the tutorial is to provide a basic grounding in simple tools and techniques for organisations to work with business processes without getting bogged down in generalities or being overwhelmed by technical details and arcane language, symbols, and notation. Learners will develop an understanding of (amongst other things) how to

• define what a process is
• identify the scope and boundaries of the process
• document the process in simple and intelligble formats to support effective discussion and action
• ensure the essential characteristics of a process are captured.

About the Course

This course is aimed at empowering learners with a basic toolset to help them understand and describe the activities that drive their organisation in simple and straightforward ways that identify key roles, responsibilities, actions, and risks within the process. 

Business processes - what they are, and how to find them

• Defining what is meant by "process" (and understanding overlaps with similar concepts)
• Overview of good practice guidelines for 'well-formed' processes
• What happens when the Map doesn't match Reality
• How to use this approach to spot what your "true" processes are
• Six key rules for Quality Processes

Working with Processes

• Bridging two perspectives: Functional (resource & skills) versus Business Process (values, results, and outcomes focussed)
• How processes affect Compliance, Quality, Application design, and organisation resourcing
• Introduction to process modeling techniques - decomposition, flow, and other techniques
• Iterative elaboration and Progressive Detail - working through the scope, concept, and specification levels
• The six enablers of Business Processes.
• Three key phases to getting Process-Oriented work done

• The Map versus the Landscape - understanding levels of perpsective
• Top-down versus bottom-up approaches for Process definition and discovery
• Processes as a foreign country - to get a map, first define the language
• Workshops versus Interviews - key tools for discovery.
• Understanding the "WHO", "WHAT", and "HOW" of the process

Diagramming and Drawing your processes

• A simple process notation that works in all tools (SIPOC)
• Workflow modelling versus Process mapping
• Swimlane Modelling techniques (how to produce useful swim lanes)
• SIPOC with Actors - a third approach.

This tutorial is NOT a training course in how to use Microsoft Visio or similar tools. It is a course on how to develop process thinking in your organisation and how to communicate more effectively using process diagrams to enable change, support compliance, and mitigate risks.

Preferred Entry Level

This tutorial is aimed at business analsysts, business managers, data protection professionals, Risk managers, IT developers and anyone involved in the management, design, or change of processes in organisations.

Price: €375 per person (Discounts available for members of certain professional bodies, Enterprise Ireland Clients, or CEB clients, and for organisations willing to host public courses and for in-house delivery)

Delivery Modes

This tutorial will initally be delivered as an on-site classroom based tutorial.

Opportunities for Further learning

Attendees at this tutorial may chose to develop skills in Information Quality Management thorugh our FETAC certified course or our IQCP Certification course.