Not sure how to start organizing your process management? Don’t worry about it! We have prepared an exclusive guide gathering Pipefy’s best practices to help you with your workflow mapping. This way, you can build what’s essential and achieve your goals, providing a great product or service to your customers and other stakeholders.
Starting from the basics, what is a process?
If we look for concepts and definitions, we’ll find many of them. But to not overcomplicate it, a process is “a series of actions that produce something or that lead to a particular result.” So, in a Purchase Process, for instance, the result is complete order, in a Sales Pipeline, it’s a won or lost deal, and in Recruiting Process, it can be a new employee hired.
It’s essential to have in mind its basic structure: input, process, and output. To exemplify, let’s think of a pizzeria.
The input is your order - a Margherita, please. In this case, the process is the steps of your pizza preparation: taking the order, putting the ingredients together, baking it, and getting the output (your pizza served).
Check out this article if you’d like to learn more about the differences between Process and Projects.
It’s not always that simple to define the phases or stages of a process. That’s why it’s extremely important to map your process with its particularities, and soon, you’ll see its benefits. There are a few tools that can assist you during the mapping stage, and you can read about them in more detail here. Based on our experience inside Pipefy and with our customers, we summed up the six main steps for business process mapping:
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Collect Information: from data to interviews, identify what and how people do what they do.
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Establish Boundaries: have visibility of what triggers your process’ start and what’s the expected outcome.
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Identify Suppliers and Customers: find out who else is impacted by your workflow.
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List and order the actions: having defined the input and output, and also the stakeholders, it’s time to list the activities and tasks that are a part of the process. Like in the pizzeria example, it was receiving the order, putting the ingredients together, baking the pizza, and serving it.
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Business rules and handoffs: business rules are conditions and scenarios already known that make decisions and next steps easier and faster. For example, in a Customer Onboarding process, the segmentation helps to decide who will manage the new account based on criteria previously agreed.
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Review and optimize: constant follow-up to ensure the steps of the process are being followed; it is essential to identify bottlenecks (check here to see how to do it!) and provide the improvements whenever possible. Measuring will help to be more precise when reviewing as well, so as soon as you get there, find the best practices on how to measure your process.
Of course, after having your workflow mapped, you can implement it on Pipefy if you haven’t yet, or work on the necessary improvements you found during this research. Pipefy also has pre-designed templates that can be customized to meet your process’ needs, so you’ll be even more agile!
Start now to automate, integrate, and measure your processes with Pipefy!