UPN LO3-5: Best practices 1 – Where to start mapping
How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?
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It can be pretty daunting when you face the challenge of where to begin mapping. Do we need to map every single process? Or just this one, because of this project? Where do I focus?
It’s definitely a combination of focus (what gives us the quickest wins, right now), scope (what do we include), and complexity (do we need to break it up in pieces). Here’s the first rule of thumb: Whatever the situation, try to always create the highest level possible of what your business tries to accomplish. E.g., we’re a shoe factory. Or an insurance company. Or a software company. In either case, what are the 4 or 6 major activities on that top level? E.g., ‘Define and adjust strategy’, ‘Market services’, ‘Sell services’, ‘Develop solution’, ‘Support customer’.
The reason trying to create such a high level, helps to embed any type of ‘lower level’ processes in the context of that main level. E.g., ‘create opportunity is definitely a subprocess of ‘Sell services’. Or ‘create ticket’ being a subprocess of ‘Support customer’.
EXPERT
You can not boil the ocean. And it probably will never be finished. Therefore, your project should not be “Map all our Salesforce processes” or “Map all our ISO 9001 processes”. Rather try to depict your core. As in “We sell stuff to our customers.” The fact that we use Salesforce to automate that and need to be ISO 9001 compliant, is a particular enabler or focus on “Selling stuff”. When you then get into a different situation in the future, you probably still “sell stuff to customers”, but your focus might be different; e.g., we need to become leaner.