How to Use a Process Map Library

by Craig Willis

Your team may be working hard to map your processes. But how can you make sure they know how to use your process map library?

Mapping your processes is just the beginning. It is also important to have a safe and easy-to-reach place for your process data and ensure that you update this knowledge regularly for future use.

Creating a process map library is an investment but also a critical step in improving your business and making life easier for everyone involved.

So, let’s get started.

What is a process map library

Let’s start with the basics.

A business process refers to the steps you take as a business to achieve a certain outcome for your business. An example of this is your payment process: The customer selects a product, goes to the online checkout, fills in their details, the payment goes through and they receive an email to confirm it. If any part of this simple description goes wrong, you might lose a customer or get an angry call.

Business process mapping is a visualisation of the actions of your business to arrive at that goal. Seeing the steps depicted in this way makes it easier for business owners, employees and stakeholders to follow along. Additionally, business process maps make it easy to discover weak points in the process: Actions that may take a lot longer than expected due to sign-off times, paperwork that is redundant or actions that are being completed by multiple teams.

And they should be a collaborative team effort, which helps foster team spirit and communication, as well as loyalty.

Business process maps can come in many forms, such as flowcharts or swim lane diagrams, all of which have their pluses and minuses. With Liberty Spark, we prefer Universal Process Notation (UPN) as it is so easy for everyone to understand and follow along, requires no additional knowledge and considers the importance of assigning roles and responsibilities to actions.

Historically, you may well have stored your processes in a filing cabinet, but today, cloud-based process mapping and improvement platforms like Liberty Spark ensure that your maps are always easy to find and up to date.

Benefits of a process map library

The benefits of having your existing business processes saved and visualised in one place cannot be overstated. You rely on those processes for key business decisions and not having them readily available is detrimental to any organisation.

A business process library is crucial for training purposes.

When new teammates or employees are added, they can study the process maps relevant to their roles and duties and refer to them at any time. They know who to contact if needed. Each step has a clear role. The process map library shows them what to do. It also explains how their actions will affect the rest of the process and the wider organisation.

Ultimately, they are able to understand how what they are doing affects business goals and can align their actions accordingly. It helps them see how they are part of achieving those goals and fosters unity in the team.

Not to mention, updated accessible processes allow you to retain company knowledge. Having your processes together makes sure you can standardise your processes, a really important part of successful process improvement, as you align them with your business goals. Having your processes saved in a process map library is also an absolute must if you are seeking to optimise your process or practice continuous process improvement.

Business process optimisation is key when you are looking to become more efficient or reduce costs. And continuous process improvement is the concept of revisiting your business process to make adjustments to become even more and more efficient over time.

Using Liberty Spark as a platform is especially instrumental when you’re looking to embed process improvement into your organisation.

Plus, we can help you measure your business process improvement.

Once you’ve mapped out your processes, it will notify you of places in your process where you are facing bottlenecks and incurring hidden costs. You can then discuss with your team what changes you might take on to fix these bottlenecks.

The solution will allow you to map out what those changes look like and also help you explore how they will impact your business over time. Changing something small doesn’t always look like a big difference. But when you calculate that change over a year, suddenly you can see the value.

Once you find the perfect solution, Spark helps you create a clear business case full of relevant data you can present to your stakeholders. Not only do you not have to spend time creating it yourself, but it is presented in a way that is easily digestible for all involved parties without requiring additional study.

And all of this is possible because you have your processes mapped out and saved within Spark’s process library function.

How to create and use a process map library with Spark

Now that we’ve gone over the benefits a process library has, you’re probably itching to get started in building one.

Spark is a great platform to do this, and it’s easy too.

Let’s dive into how creating and managing your process library works.

Each business has a workspace where all of its processes are saved and can be made. Within each workspace, there are folders, typically divided by team or department. This does not mean others cannot access them. There are access controls to include those in the process. However, it helps organise your process maps by the teams responsible for most of the work.

Within the folders, each process has a name and an owner, making it easy to tell them apart when revisiting for improvement or to make other changes. In addition, Spark has a tagging system that helps you qualify processes, based on status or project type. If a particular process has an ongoing project, you can tag it with the name of that project. The tag can then also be retired once the project is completed. In fact you can customise the process properties of any process, any way you like!

Each company also gets its own unique landing page from which you can access the different maps for each department, complete with a URL.

We recommend that each process map is as granular and specific as possible, as the more they are the easiest it is to manage their history and revision management. It is visible to see what version of the process map you are on, and who edited the last one.

Once published, this becomes the version that is opened by default, but it can still be edited. Any other changes are also saved in audit logs, which helps create trust and transparency.

With Spark you also set up process reviews. This will help remind you to constantly review your existing processes, so you may find new improvement spots. You will be able to practice continuous improvement effortlessly.

Process review owners are contacted when reviews are due and you can measure the health of your processes by checking on user interaction and process quality. All of this in a process map library that is easy to find and use.

A process map library is key to successful process mapping  

Process libraries will help save you a ton of headaches.  

Even more when they’re built in a collaborative, cloud-based platform that keeps everyone involved and accountable for their roles and any changes they make.  

And if you’re looking to improve or cut costs, they are instrumental in helping you figure out the best places to do so.   

If you’re ready to begin building processes and process libraries, make sure to get in touch!