Grandma

My grandmother was known for her delicious meals. She had it all internalized and mixed ingredients according to what was available and adapted to taste, smell and appearance. She didn’t need any recipes. The problem was when we wanted to replicate her dishes. We needed instructions so we had to come over early to our Sunday lunches and start writing down each step. After that, we still needed to check if it tasted anything like what she made. If we missed something, we updated the instructions and tried it again. Of course, once we got it right, we wouldn’t keep it only to ourselves. Everyone in our family wanted to get the joy of repeating what she did with mastery.

But it was so hard to prepare those recipes, I had to choose a few family favorites. It’s the same in business, we need to define the criteria to detect if we should create processes. Common indications are if the process is repetitive, needs to be standardized across units or has many interactions with different teams or departments. Once you know the processes that need attention, you can create them. That’s when the fun begins but also when ideas are blurred.

When people approached me to help them design their processes and I explained how they could do it themselves, I realized how the recipe format helps them to unveil what needs to be done. Here are the steps to create processes adapted from the recipe format:

  1. Engage stakeholders: Interviewing the people who do the work is key. The more they participate, the more they own the process. Better yet, ask to watch them doing their tasks to identify how the process works in practice.

  2. Map out the process: Create a process flow, prefer a visual over a textual representation. Draw an overview that gives context to the stakeholders. As you detail the process, focus on the readability by making it simple, creating the flow from left to right, using short, atomic and clear names for activities, labeling swimlanes that are representatives to the teams, etc.

  3. Review with stakeholders: Use processes as a discussion tool. Present draft processes to help in review sessions. Stakeholders detect more inconsistencies and remember more details when they see visual flow of activities, instead of text.

  4. Follow the process: To know if the process works, follow the process yourself or watch people following them to make sure they’ll give the expected results.

  5. Update the process: We shouldn’t expect to get it right at first, putting on paper a process that is done by different people takes iterations to get it right.

  6. Share the process: Processes are created to be shared and made easily available to everyone who wants to learn and understand what to do. Publishing processes makes it easier to use them in workshops and collaborations with stakeholders when explaining, executing, reviewing and updating.

Even if you follow these steps, you might not get the results you want if you don’t follow a major principle: document every process as if you wanted to follow it. Would they understand what’s drawn? Would they know what to do? Would they know who to contact when there is interaction in the flow of activities?

Writing down my grandma’s recipes would’ve been easy if all I wanted to do was save them in my bookshelf. It was only when I baked them that I was sure I didn’t miss anything. With this recipe approach, we create processes that others can follow.