You are reading a guide that explains how to build up your organization's Operational Knowledge. This article covers how to accomplish stage 2 in operational knowledge maturity scale.
When to capture 'As-Is' UPN diagram from existing documentation?
If you organization already possesses text documentation, policies, or BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) diagrams that outline your ways of working, then it is far easier to make a transition to detailed, UPN-centric documentation.
You can import existing and current documentation to capture the 'As-Is' process diagram and then schedule a workshop with relevant stakeholders to fill out and complete the missing details (as UPN requires capture of more detail than other notations).
If you think your existing documentation is outdated and inaccurate, and you don't trust it, then it might be a better idea to capture the 'As-Is' process state during live discovery workshops.
Prerequisites
Access to all relevant customer documentation.
Diagram GPT license for automated diagram generation.
Implementation guide
Step 1: Gather documentation
Collect all relevant documentation, including text documents, policies, and any existing BPMN / flowchart diagrams that detail the current processes. Organize them by business department and function. For instance:
Marketing team:
Marketing campaign lifecycle
Lead capture and nurture
Lead qualification
etc.
Sales team:
Opportunity development
Forecasting
etc.
Step 2: Prepare documentation
Before you import existing documentation into Elements, you need to review it and prepare it for import.
That is because Elements supports UPN notation, not BPMN / flowcharts. Following UPN best practice, a single UPN diagram that gets generated will be rather small, no more than 12-18 activity boxes on the screen. This is because UPN is a hierarchical diagramming notation, where each diagram is meant to be easily readable and digestible by everyone.
Policy and process documents, as well as BPMN diagrams, tend to be all-encompassing. If you take a screenshot of a big BPMN diagram, or copy text of the entire PDF policy file, the generated UPN diagram will not represent the entire detail.
Here is what to do:
If you have a large text file or BPMN diagram, with many 'phases', categories or headings, note those down first as the overview. These will form the the backbone of your 'top level' UPN diagram when you generate a new diagram.
Once you have your 'top level' diagram captured, copy text for each phase, category, or heading in the document, OR take a screenshot of the relevant part of the entire BPMN process. This will allow you to then generate a child diagram for the selected step in the top level process.
Step 3A: Generate top-level diagram from text
If you have PDF, Google/Microsoft Word text documents outlining your procedures or policies relating to a given business function, then follow these steps:
Click Create new map with AI from the dropdown
Name it and provide process description.
Copy and paste the text of the high-level process overview.
Click 'create'
Diagram that will be created will follow UPN format.
Limitation: resources of type 'human' get generated for diagrams, but not system or other resources.
Step 3B: Generate top-level diagram from flowchart/ BPMN screenshot
If you have your current process information captured in other diagram notations, like BPMN or flowcharts, and you wish to import it into UPN, then:
Click Create new map with AI from the dropdown
Name it and provide process description.
Take a screenshot or export image of the diagram and import it.
Generate map
Diagram that will be created will follow the UPN format.
Limitation: resources of type 'human' get generated for diagrams, but not system or other resources.
Step 4: Review and sanitize
The diagrams generated with our AI capability, whether from text or image, are an interpretation of the original content, not like-for-like transcription. Therefore it is essential for you to go through the diagram and make sure all the details are accurate.
Step 5: Capture detailed child diagrams
Once you confirm the 'top level' process is accurate, select a single activity box in the diagram, and create a new child diagram with AI. You can fundamentally repeat the steps outlined before and either generate a diagram from importing text or image.
Step 6: Gather business stakeholders
The first step is to gather the right business stakeholders in the room. This should include all the key people who perform a given business function. For instance, if you are mapping the sales process, you should get the sales team, and not members of other functions like finance or marketing.
If your organization is very large, and a business function has dozens or hundreds of employees performing the same job, then you should focus on key managers who are closest to the day-to-day operations.
For discovery workshops, it is recommended to avoid just relying on a single senior manager for a business function. That is because they tend to have a view of 'what should be happening', which is often different from reality on the ground.
Since the purpose of the workshop is to discover the current 'As-Is' process with all its inefficiencies, the workshop participants should primarily be people who are involved in day-to-day execution of the job.
If you have identified owners and stakeholders on key capabilities and metadata, you can run a stakeholder report in your metadata dictionary to produce a list of initial stakeholders.
Step 7: Review and capture outcomes with stakeholders
The most powerful and challenging aspect of mapping good UPN diagrams is capturing clear, distinct, and verifiable outcomes on activities.
Most documentation, whether textual or in the form of flowcharts, is very vague on why we perform certain activities and what is the expected output. It is not uncommon for official process documentation to contain circular and vague outputs. Consider the example below:
One of the valuable benefits of translating flowcharts and BPMN diagrams into UPN is that it highlights how many details are actually missing!
Consider the example UPN diagram below, that resulted from generating a BPMN flowchart diagram:
There are a few details missing from the diagram, for example:
What is the overall trigger for the process to start?
No activity leads to clear, distinct, and verifiable outcomes. For instance, how do we know that order is prepared? What information should it contain and where should it be logged?
It is common for people to think of outcomes as past-tense of the activity itself, e.g. 'Log a case' -> 'Case created'. But that does not reveal to us the business value of why do it in the first place (are we just logging cases for case-sake?). More importantly, it doesn't clarify what the success criteria are of doing so.
Challenge your subject matter experts with following questions to help reveal the clear, distinct, and verifiable outcomes for each step in the process:
What would happen if we didn't do the activity? What would we lose?
How would I know that Sean performed that activity? What would be the proof?
What's the difference between performing this activity well and poorly? What would be the difference in the final result?
Step 8: Capture sentiment, pain points, opportunities for improvement
At this point you have captured the As-Is business process, for a given scenario, in its entirety. Now is the time for analysis!
Encourage your workshop participants to comment on what works and doesn't work about the process. There are two ways you can do that:
Capture ideas as post-it notes
You can encourage workshop participants to leave post-it notes around the diagram to highlight their paint points and ideas for improvement.
You have to agree on the methodology, like use of color. For instance, red for pain points, green for ideas or different color for each person.
Once everyone has added their sticky notes, you can filter them on the screen to only show post-it notes added by specific person, of specific color, or specific tag.
Capture structured feedback with data tables
Custom data tables can be attached to each step in the process, enabling the structured capture of detailed information, such as pain points, ideas for improvement, and expected business KPIs. These tables also function as smart, contextual surveys, allowing workshop participants to provide input in a structured manner.
Tip: You can either capture data table records in a live-worksop setting OR ask participants to fill it out asynchronously in their own time.
Proposed data tables:
Data table for capturing pain points
Data table for capturing pain points
Pain Point Description (Text)
Purpose: Provides a brief description of the pain point to clearly understand the issue.
Impact (Picklist)
Purpose: Captures the severity of the pain point on the business.
Values: Low, Medium, High
Frequency (Picklist)
Purpose: Indicates how often the pain point occurs to help prioritize resolutions.
Values: Rarely, Occasionally, Frequently
Employee Feedback (Text)
Purpose: Direct comments from employees regarding the pain point, offering insight into the issue's nature.
Priority (Picklist)
Purpose: Helps to prioritize the pain points based on urgency and impact.
Values: Low, Medium, High
Conditional Logic: If Impact is 'High,' default Priority to 'High.'
Data table for capturing ideas
Data table for capturing ideas
Idea Description (Text)
Purpose: Provides a brief summary of the improvement idea, allowing employees to suggest what a better process or solution would look like.
Expected Impact (Picklist)
Purpose: Captures the perceived positive impact of the idea from the employee's perspective, helping prioritize which ideas might be most beneficial.
Values: Low, Medium, High
Employee Suggestion (Picklist)
Purpose: Identifies whether the idea was suggested by employees or management, ensuring transparency about the source of ideas.
Values: Employee, Management