6 Principles for Better Process Design

Issue #3 🧩 Everyday struggles with lack of processes 🧩 Apollo 13 and its successful failure 🧩 Why we need processes 🧩 Six principles for better process design

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Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

We live in a world where processes direct us at every step.

Simply going out to the supermarket means we engage in:

• social norms regarding appearance and behavior,

• traffic regulations,

• supermarket layout, customer service, financial transactions,

• etc.

And that’s just for a routine errand.

How do we ensure that all these processes add value to our lives?

Read on 👇

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📑 NOTE: Treat my posts like mini-guides: choose what’s relevant or interesting.

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📂 Office Administration at Its Finest

Every few years, I go to my bank to pick up my new debit card. Their procedure for storing and finding these cards never ceases to amaze me! And they haven’t changed it for more than 15 years, since I first became their client.

The procedure goes like this:

Step 1: They check in their computer system if the card is physically in their office or still in transit. It’s always in their office. Since this is one of the cards I don’t use so often, I usually go to pick it up months after it’s been delivered.

Step 2: They start searching for my card. And that card can be literally anywhere! Huge office, top-to-bottom shelves on each wall. All shelves full of massive folders, and all folders full of documents, cards, and whatnot. One would think that the cards are only in one specific folder on one specific shelf in one specific corner, but no. They are all over the place. Especially if the cards were delivered more than a few weeks ago (because at first, the piles of freshly delivered cards reside on everyone’s desk 🙄).

The last time I was there, I spent close to an hour waiting for them to find my card. First, it was only one lady searching, then two, then three. They went through all the folders, and when they reached the end and didn't find it, they started all over again. Luckily, I was in no hurry.

Toward the end of this ordeal, I couldn’t help but ask the lady I first spoke to: “Excuse me, I work as a Business Process Manager. Purely from a process perspective, I’m really curious: Why don’t you mark in that computer system of yours where the card is physically? Office okay, but then maybe also shelf, folder name or number, pages ordered alphabetically, something of the sort?”

Now, you might think that she was super impressed by my suggestion. Or that she told me to mind my own BPM business. But it was neither of the two. She simply didn’t understand what I was saying 🙈

Still, I have to give credit where credit is due: Chaos has its wonderful sides too! If you don’t know what the right thing to do is, you also don’t know what the wrong thing to do is. When you’re supposed to be following procedures to the letter, and those procedures don’t cover all edge cases, you can make the mistake of actually helping a client. Which they have 😉

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🚀 Apollo 13’s Successful Failure