For a project I was involved in, I was one of the process analysts in the team of a total twelve people  in the project. The project was part of a software development and digital transformation  programme of a public authority. There was a limited time of effort to be paid. In one year we had to  deliver a working software to be used by all the authority departments. The project we were  responsible for was the document management system of the authority. The knowledge of the  domain was not documented properly and unfortunately a couple of department employees were  holding this knowledge in their minds. So the analysis part of the modules of the software was really  hard to define from an analyst’s perspective. I had to find a way to discover the unwritten best  practices of the departments, somehow. And it should also work for anybody in the same  department and both for the other departments as their internal stakeholders. Selection I decided to  use the approach mindmapping for finding better answers to the department employees’ problems  with the existing process they were following. Because in that way I could let all employees in the  department to say their words about missing pieces of the processes. And also the ideas or solutions  coming from the real users of the future software would be covered by the process I was trying to  define for our developers. Application & Approach I asked department managers to arrange a couple  of meetings with the employees in their departments. These meetings had parts that I told  attendees what we’re going to discuss and how they would commit their ideas as a solution to their  own problems with the process they were used to follow. So I started with defining the AS-IS  situation of the processes with their help, and as the second part of the meetings, I was asking  people to think in a different way that would help their process to be followed in a smooth and  faster way. Employees of the department in the meetings were asked to raise their ideas without  knowing others’ ideas to develop the existing processes they’re following. Using sticky notes was  helping us to write down ideas without anybody else's help. And after a given duration, I was asking  attendees to put their ideas into a whiteboard. All ideas were then grouped into problematic areas  of the process. After collecting the ideas and grouping them, we were easily discussing the  prioritization and were able to see dead-end points of the flows, easily. After mindmapping studies, I  was updating the flow diagrams of the processes of the departments and suggesting alternative  flows to be discussed again in a secondary decision meeting to document our solution. Insight At the  end of the meetings, all employees in different departments were able to point to the obstacle  points of the processes they were following. So the actual improvement in the processes was coming  from the mindmapping meetings. The authority departments were able to continue the  mindmapping meetings for finding problematic points in their old fashioned flows.

