Mind Mapping

Challenge

As part of my consulting engagement, I was given the task to lead the project focussing on  automating the processes (or part of the process) performed by the back-office employees. This would  help create some bandwidth for them to focus on more value added work and getting rid of mundane  unproductive work.

Selection

As we were working with stakeholders belonging to different level  (viz. Process Level ,

Department Level or Project sponsor level) , it became a natural choice for us to use mind mapping to  put everything the stakeholders had in their thoughts visually represented. This has proved helpful when  relationships among pieces, dependencies can be easily seen. It was also an obvious expectation that  this would help in getting alignment over the scope and subsequent strategy.

Application

The project was sponsored by the head of back-office department who had a very diverse and

dynamic experience within the Operations space. The objective of the project was to make the routine  activities more efficient and automation is seen as an important means to do that. When drawing the  mind map of the expectations of the sponsor, it was clear that efficiency is the only key objective and  everything else was just seen as a framework to help the organisation achieve the same.

When performing the same at the junior/SMEs level , it became apparent that the process looks  mundane and is therefore seen as a low value task where employees were quoted giving less than 15%  of their time in learning/challenging opportunities.

Insight

It became apparent when performing the mind-mapping exercise that the problem is more

focussed towards the issues with the process inefficiency and should never been seen straightaway as  an automation opportunity. The missing instruction manuals, non-standard approach of performing  processes and key-person risk in few cases became apparent while performing the exercise. In simple  words, this looks more like a problem which needs to be tackled through business and not through  technology.

Approach

As an advisor and implementation partner to the client, we suggested them to see this primarily as a  project reengineering exercise first and then plan for automation.

As expected, from the analysis obtained during/after the exercise, the processes were made 35%  accurate without introducing any new technology. Once this has been done, automation was introduced  to get over the remaining repetitive task and used only at the place when needed.

Owing to our experience working on past projects, we observed that getting the visual representation of  the sponsors is most important to understand the firm’s objective (at a higher level) followed by the  same activity with the junior business owners.

This would not only help us figure out and show them the findings and suggestions for their internal  alignment, but also help us figure out the problem in a more pragmatic perspective.

