Welcome back to Two-for-One, our monthly look at practical ways organizations can address common challenges in Business Process Management. This month, we turn to a problem that is far more widespread than many leaders admit: the desire to improve business processes without a clear sense of where to begin.
Many organizations recognise the value of Business Process Optimisation, yet they lack a starting point, a structure, or even a reliable view of how work currently flows through the business. This uncertainty often becomes the single greatest barrier to improvement. When a company doesn’t know what its processes are, who owns them, or how consistently they are followed, meaningful progress becomes difficult.
Starting well matters. A deliberate first step sets the foundation for improvement, establishes clarity, and ensures that future efforts focus on the right areas.
In many organizations, the absence of active process optimisation does not present itself as a dramatic event. Instead, it’s a series of subtle but compounding issues: delays in handovers, duplicated tasks, inconsistent customer experiences, rising operational costs, or employees voicing frustration about unclear responsibilities.
Consider a business where different teams approach the same task in completely different ways. One group uses a shared drive, another relies on email chains, and a third person has a spreadsheet only they understand. Each version “works,” but none of them work together. When questions arise about accountability or efficiency, no one can point to a documented process—because none exists.
Operating on tribal knowledge and legacy practices introduces risks. Work becomes person-dependent rather than system-dependent. When someone leaves, so does the process. Bottlenecks go unnoticed. Improvement efforts default to symptoms rather than root causes.
Without visibility into how the organisation truly functions, leaders cannot prioritise, measure progress, or identify where investment would be most effective. This is where a structured starting point becomes essential.
Description
A process inventory is the first structured step toward Business Process Optimisation. It involves listing the core processes across all departments—how work starts, how it moves, and how it ends. This inventory typically captures elements such as the process name, the owner, its purpose, tools involved, inputs, outputs, and any known challenges.
It is simple, manageable, and immediately clarifying. Even a lightweight inventory can reveal overlaps, single points of failure, and gaps in accountability.
Benefits
Long-Term Impact
A well-maintained inventory becomes the backbone of process governance. It supports continuous improvement efforts, makes digital transformation initiatives more coherent, and helps align teams around how work should function. Most importantly, it replaces assumptions with shared understanding.
Description
Once the inventory is in place, the next step is to translate key processes into simple visual maps. Business Process Mapping makes the flow of work visible by capturing steps, decision points, handovers, and the systems involved. These diagrams help teams see inefficiencies and identify where responsibilities are unclear or where delays occur.
You don’t need specialised tools to start. Even a whiteboard session can produce meaningful clarity.
Benefits
Long-Term Impact
Process maps are a foundation for standardisation, automation, and methodologies like Lean or Six Sigma. They support onboarding, knowledge transfer, and quality control by replacing oral histories with documented, agreed-upon practices. Over time, they help an organisation work more predictably and transparently.
Starting with an inventory and basic mapping is straightforward, but the work prompts important strategic questions:
These questions are central not only to Business Process Mapping, but also to broader operational decision-making. If you’re interested in exploring how process visibility shapes better business decisions, consider reviewing our paper on process-oriented decision-making.
You cannot improve what you cannot see. For organisations unsure where to begin with Business Process Optimisation, two reliable starting points—creating a process inventory and mapping core workflows—offer structure, clarity, and momentum.
These first steps create the conditions for sustainable improvement. They make processes visible, align teams around shared understanding, and help leaders make better choices about where to invest time and resources.
The first step is creating a company-wide process inventory to understand how work is currently performed and where inefficiencies may exist.
A process inventory provides visibility, clarifies ownership, and helps organisations prioritise which processes need improvement first.
Business Process Mapping is the visual representation of a process, showing steps, handovers, decisions, and tools to make workflows easier to analyse and improve.
It reveals redundancies, bottlenecks, unclear responsibilities, and opportunities for standardisation, making it easier to identify improvement areas.
Many organisations lack visibility into how work is done, rely on undocumented practices, or simply don’t know where to start with structured improvement efforts.