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.
Why capture the future To-Be way of operating from scratch?
When the current state (As-Is) reveals deep-rooted inefficiencies or outdated processes, attempting to evolve from the existing model can limit innovation and fail to address underlying issues.
Starting fresh with a blank slate allows you to design a future state (To-Be) that is tailored to meet the organization’s long-term objectives and operational efficiency. Without this approach, businesses risk incremental changes that don't resolve core issues, leading to continued inefficiencies and misalignment with strategic goals.
When to capture the To-Be way of operating from scratch?
When As-Is processes are fundamentally broken: If the As-Is state shows systemic issues, such as process bottlenecks, high error rates, or customer dissatisfaction, designing from scratch can eliminate these roadblocks.
When business strategy has shifted significantly: A major strategic change, such as digital transformation or entering new markets, may require completely new processes that are unencumbered by past constraints.
When innovation is a priority: If the goal is to leapfrog competitors by implementing cutting-edge practices, technology, or customer experiences, a fresh start allows for maximum flexibility and creativity.
Otherwise, you should follow this separate solution guide on capturing To-Be from the As-Is diagrams.
Prerequisites
Understanding of UPN diagramming methodology
Process-led-change product license
How to capture a To-Be business process from scratch?
Step 1: Define the vision for the future state
Before you embark on a To-Be discovery workshop, meet with the key stakeholders / management to agree on the business outcomes.The questions in this stage aim to clarify the organization’s strategic goals and operational needs, ensuring that the future state is designed with a clear direction in mind.
Action steps:
Meet with business leaders and define key business outcomes, such as increasing operational efficiency, enhancing customer experience, or supporting new product lines.
Questions to ask
Questions to ask
Vision and Strategy:
“What strategic goals must this process support in the next 2-3 years?”
“How do you envision this new process driving business growth or enhancing customer experiences?”
“What market changes or competitive pressures should this new process help us respond to?”
“Are there any major company initiatives (e.g., digital transformation, product expansion) that this process should align with?”
Operational Objectives:
“What are the current KPIs that need the most improvement, and how can this new process impact them?”
“Where are we losing efficiency, and how should the future state resolve these issues?”
“How does this new process need to scale as the company grows or changes?”
Technology and Innovation:
“How should this process leverage new technologies like automation, AI, or machine learning?”
“What digital tools or platforms do we want to integrate into this process?”
“How flexible does the process need to be to accommodate future technology advancements?”
Customer-Centric Focus:
“What should be the top priority for improving the customer experience in this future state?”
“How can we design this process to better anticipate and meet customer needs?”
“What feedback have we received from customers about this part of the business, and how should it inform our future state?”
Risk and Compliance:
“What are the biggest risks in the current process, and how should the future state mitigate them?”
“Are there any regulatory or compliance factors that need to be embedded into the new process?”
Document these outcomes as Business Requirements in Elements to ensure that the To-Be design stays aligned.
Step 2: 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.
Since the purpose of the workshop is to discover the desired 'To-Be' process with all its enhancements, the workshop participants should be a mix of management and people executing a job on a daily basis, providing insight into issues at different levels of execution.
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 3: Establish and communicate workshop rules
Running a successful discovery workshop requires abiding by very clear rules of engagement. These rules should be outlined in the invitation email and at the beginning of the workshop.
Here are our recommended rules:
Everyone's input is welcome
One at a time talking
Silence = agreement
Map 'happy route' first
Watch the video from Calvaria, one of our partners, that articulates all of these rules in a live workshop setting:
Step 4: Choose a scenario
The #1 challenge in a process discovery workshop is the 'this is too complex to capture as a linear diagram'.
First, you can assure participants that diagrams don't have to be linear. Secondly, in most cases the processes are not as complex and scenarios that different from each other as it seems!
The best approach is first to:
List all the different scenarios as different 'inputs':
Agree to take one, ideally the simplest 'happy path' scenario first to map out.
Once you are done, you can take another scenario and reflect with the group how the baseline process changes with this new condition.
Step 5: Create the empty boxes (seriously!)
Empty page can be intimidating. People often don't know where to start talking through their desired To-Be. Furthermore, there is a tendency to go straight into explaining the sequence of steps someone takes through the process. That can lead to 'tunnel vision' and focusing on just one set of activities.
Instead, start by creating a bunch of empty activity boxes on the screen (at least 12) and ask your participants to list all the activities or tasks the new process should be supporting, irrespective of sequence or who does them.
Why start with empty boxes?
When capturing a To-Be process in a workshop, it's more effective to first ask participants to list all the "things" or "steps" that should be included, without worrying about sequence.
This encourages creativity and ensures that all ideas are captured before narrowing the focus. By avoiding the constraints of strict chronology at the start, participants can freely suggest improvements and innovations, leading to a more complete picture of the process. This approach also prevents early bottlenecks in the discussion, as debating the order of steps can slow down momentum and limit ideas.
Once all potential steps are gathered, it’s easier to organize them into a logical sequence, as the flow often becomes clearer when everything is visible. This method allows the group to assess which steps are essential and how they relate to each other, ensuring a smoother and more productive refinement of the To-Be process.
Step 6: Document Why? outcomes
The most powerful and challenging aspect of mapping good UPN diagrams is capturing clear, distinct, and verifiable outcomes on activities.
For the To-Be process to reveal useful and actionable information, we need to understand not only what happens, but why? Consider the example below:
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?) nor what are the success criteria of doing so.
Challenge your workshop participants with following questions to help reveal the clear, distinct, and verifiable outcomes:
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 7: Order the activities
At this point you should have a series of unconnected, active verb-based activities with clear, distinct and verifiable outcomes.
Ask the participants to now order them in a sequence. What happens first? What happens next? Connect the outcomes to the boxes to create a connected, sequential diagram.
It is possible that some activities are done in parallel or follow OR logic (e.g. if case is urgent, we do X, if it isn't we do Y). In that case, consider these diagramming rules in UPN.
Review of AND / OR logic mapping
Review of AND / OR logic mapping
One of the most common questions we hear is 'where is the decision diamond?' In flowcharts, it is a symbol that represents a decision point or a question that needs to be answered. UPN supports only one shape, hence there is no diamond. So what now?
An activity can have multiple flowlines coming out of it.
If those flowlines have different origin points (they do not overlap), it represents different outcomes and different paths a process can follow.
An activity can have multiple flowlines coming out of it.
If those flowlines originate from the same point, it represents the same outcome and parallel paths the process will follow. In this case, the same outcome triggers 3 different subsequent activities simultaneously
An activity can have multiple flowlines coming into it.
If those flowlines come at different target points, it represents separate triggers for an activity. In this case, any of the 3 flowlines represents an input that on its own is enough to start the next step.
An activity can have multiple flowlines coming into it.
If those flowlines all arrive at the same target point, it represents multiple necessary conditions for an activity to start. In this case, all 3 activities must be successfully performed for the next activity to begin
Step 8: Document Who? and How?
Now that you have a very good backbone of your business process flow, ask the participants to specify who actually should be involved in those process steps. This is where you add resources to the process activities.
While the focus is primarily on Who will be responsible for performing the activity?, you should also consider adjacent roles, like:
Who is consulted?
Who needs to be informed?
Who needs to authorize this decision?
This information is rarely considered in the beginning, as stakeholders focus on what they do, but this questioning can reveal a lot of additional stakeholders and implied communication activities.
Read more on RASCI responsibility matrix here.
While you are capturing the resources on activities, you should also ask questions like:
'How will be you performing those activities?'
'What systems will we be using for this?'
The focus is on discovering systems (Salesforce, Gainsight, LinkedIn, Spreadsheet etc.) and specific features (Opportunity object, Account object etc.) utilized for each activity.
The result should be a diagram that looks somewhat like this:
Step 9: Organize boxes together into categories and create child diagrams
Remember the rule
UPN diagrams should be understandable to anyone reading them, even if the creator isn't there to explain it.
The idea behind UPN notation has always been to produce diagrams that are understandable to any audience, without the need for training or legend into meaning of different shapes or colors.
Psychological research also tells us that the more complex the picture, the more variables people are presented with, the more confused they become.
At this point in your discovery workshop, chances are that the diagram you have captured with all the activities and outcomes could be fairly extensive. Like the one below:
With 25 activity boxes on the screen, the diagram, while laid-out sequentially, is too big to read at once. Users cannot comprehend it without zooming in extensively, and in a live-workshop setting, where you might need to share your screen or present it using a projector, the diagram will be too large to read from the back of the room.
Try to organize and group activities that are related to each other. For instance, select all activities that use the same object or system and send them to a separate child diagram.
If all activities are done in a single system, and even on the same object, look out for delineation events. For instance, you might capture all activities related to initial case assessment, before escalation, as a separate diagram, and activities that happen after escalation as another.
Tip
Business process diagrams are most readable on a screen when there is no more than 8-12 activity boxes on the screen.
The result should be a cleaned-up, hierarchically organized set of diagrams that looks somewhat like this:
Step 10: Map out another scenario
At this point you have completed a full capture and analysis of the To-Be business process for a given scenario. But remember, there are 'other' paths that might still need to be captured!
Review the other scenarios that were noted in the beginning. Encourage the participants to go through the captured process and reflect on how and where the process changes.
Example: you mapped out the desired process for capturing and analyzing customer cases that are auto-scored to drive prioritization. You can then look at cases which are logged as high-priority manually by account owners and reflect if any step in the process is any different.
In case of differences, you can:
Add additional, conditional steps in the process
Add notes to activity boxes to provide some explanation and clarification on the subtleties between handling case type A and case type B
Once the 'To-Be' state (updated Draft) of your business process diagrams have been approved by the stakeholders, it is time to capture detailed deliverables.
Continue to this solution guide on conducting fit-gap analysis to learn how.