This exercise will allow us to gather a true overview of your day to day, holding a mirror up to your organisation.
To achieve this, we’ll need to gather as much information from the whole team as we can. We’ll manage this through a form which will be sent out to as many people as possible … the results of this will enable us to map how your organisation looks based around job roles and responsibilities, weekly/daily tasks, and the processes used to complete them.
The form itself is comprised of 20 questions, ranging from confirmations i.e. name and email address, through to detailed response questions. Where a more comprehensive response is requested, it would be great for responders to give as much information as they can. The more we have, the better we’ll be able to process this stage of the mapping exercise.
For those who prefer to do so, the form can be completed verbally, with the answers transcribed to text by the background AI. Clicking the microphone icon at the bottom of the page will enable this feature for that specific question. The colour combination has been designed to be suitable for most users, but for those with different visual requirements we can change the aesthetics as required.
Once we have collated all the responses, we’ll begin the mapping process. This isn’t just an organisational hierarchy, but a visual representation of the workflows and structure, highlighting all the different processes happening throughout the body of the organisation. Think of it like a traffic map; we’re looking for where traffic jams are happening frequently and where the traffic is always moving smoothly … understanding the where’s and why’s will help us to identify the tools we need to get things flowing in the right direction and keep it that way.
After the forms have been completed and we’ve started the mapping at our end, we’ll need to check in with a few people to dig into the details. To use the traffic map analogy again, this is where we’ve located a red patch of congestion, and we want to know what’s causing it. To do this, we’ll need to observe processes in action. That will move us on to the next stage of your plan.
We’ll cover this next stage in more detail when we reach it, but it’s at this point that we’ll be arranging the first of our site visits with the people who we’d like to observe carrying out their roles and responsibilities. It will be minimally invasive, and mostly an opportunity for us to watch, learn and document, so we can start plotting the routes around those congested areas. Don’t worry though, we’ll give you plenty of time and notice for who we’d like to shadow and when.