When you think about your business processes, what comes to mind? Whether you have a business process management system or not, your team likely has some sort of mapped or documented business processes. And whether they be simple and linear or highly complex with multiple branching paths, these processes are the driving force behind how your company operates on a day-to-day basis. With that being said, most businesses could benefit from innovating their current business processes in new and exciting ways. That’s where whiteboard design comes in! You may have heard of whiteboard design before, but it likely wasn’t in the context of improving your business processes. Whiteboard design is a relatively new way to approach mapping out and to design new business processes. It involves using a whiteboard as a visual aid to brainstorm ideas and create diagrams for each process step.
What is whiteboard & process design?
Whiteboard and process design identifies and maps out the various steps and tasks involved in a business process. It’s a visual representation of how an organization operates and the information between each step. The goal of whiteboard and process design is to make it easier for people who aren’t familiar with your business to understand how it works. This can help train new employees, communicate changes to existing staff, or even just for your benefit. Whiteboard diagramming software makes creating these diagrams easy by letting you draw on a blank canvas using simple shapes and lines. Some programs even allow you to add text boxes and images to explain what each step in a process entails.
How do I use whiteboard and process design?
Whiteboard diagramming software is designed to make creating these diagrams simple, so you’ll find that most programs have some sort of wizard that walks you through each step of creating a diagram. You’ll start by choosing which type of diagram you want to create — there are many types available, including flowcharts, swim lanes, mind maps, Gantt charts, PERT charts, and more, then adding objects such as boxes connecting lines and labels.
How whiteboard and process design can help your business
Many companies overlook the importance of process design and analysis when it comes to business workflows. It’s easy to assume that your company is already operating as efficiently as possible. So therefore, a focus on process improvement isn’t necessary, but there’s more to this than simply the bottom line.
It provides a visual model of how things work
Thinking about how your business works can be helpful, but it’s easy to get lost in the details. Whiteboard and process design can help you see the big picture by providing a visual model of the relationships between things, which allows you to see where your business is going and what is essential to its success.
It helps you communicate with others easily
Whiteboard and process design make it easy to understand your business. Your whiteboard design can be shared with others, making it easy for people who don’t work for you to understand what your company does and how it works. It’s easier to update a whiteboard than an endless document or multiple documents so that everyone will have the latest version of the plan at their fingertips. Tracking progress through a process is also easier on a whiteboard because all stakeholders can see where they are in relation to one another and how much work remains before completion. This makes it easy for team members to know when they need help or input from one another, which helps keep projects moving forward smoothly without too much interruption.
It helps your team see what’s important
Whiteboard and process mapping can help you make sense of the essential things and show you what’s not crucial.
It helps show progress
One of the great things about whiteboard and process design is that it allows you to see how far you have come. You can track how many steps are involved in a particular action, from beginning to end. This can help with understanding exactly what needs to be done and seeing where the bottlenecks lie. It also shows that progress has been made, which is very important for motivation and morale.
It can be an ongoing reference guide
A whiteboard process design is easy to display your current workflow visually. It can be used as a reference guide, checklist, and guide to follow when improving processes. It can also improve communication among teams working on different aspects of the same project. Everyone involved in every part of the process must understand what they need to do and how their job fits into the big picture. A whiteboard process design can help show everyone involved where they fit in, who else will be doing their job, and if there are any potential bottlenecks or other challenges that need addressing before they begin working on their part of the project.
Whiteboard and process design can help you improve the way you work
- It can be used to help you get started.
- It can help you see the big picture.
- It can help you understand your customers.
- It can help you communicate with others about important things, like what’s going on in their lives, why they do things a certain way, where they want to go next, etc.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that whiteboard and process design can help you improve the way you work. Whether it’s capturing ideas, mapping processes, or developing a workflow for your business, there’s a lot of value in sketching out how things work. It might sound obvious, but you never know what you’ll learn from drawing something!