What is Process Analysis?
Process analysis is the practice of evaluating an existing process to identify inefficiencies and opportunities to improve.
The processes to be evaluated are often called as-is processes, meaning they reflect the current state of a process. As-is processes can be evaluated for an entire organization or for a specific department or team.
To complete process analysis, you must map out the process as it currently stands and identify ways to optimize or improve it by locating the areas that are bottlenecked or ineffective.
Process analysis is the first step in the broader practice of business process management, which is all about maximizing an organization’s efficiency.
Back to topBenefits of Process Analysis
Process analysis is a valuable practice for organizations because effective processes are the backbone of a business that operates efficiently and serves its customers well.
There are many reasons you might want to evaluate a particular business process, from making sure that you comply with new regulatory standards to determining how to introduce new practices, but here are three benefits that come from process analysis in most cases.
Increase Productivity
Do parts of a process consistently perform slower than expected? Is the team performing the work frustrated about the way the process is going?
Process analysis addresses these concerns by giving you a space to take a look at what’s going on and identify ways to make pain-point processes more efficient, so you can deliver great work faster. It can also help you evaluate your team’s workload to determine if any tasks need to be reallocated.
Reduce Costs
Process analysis helps you identify areas where unnecessary resources are being used. This can take many forms — reducing the work hours spent on the process or the number of people who are involved in the process, to name a couple examples.
Proactive process analysis can also help you reduce cost by addressing problems early rather than dealing with the consequences when they become too significant to ignore.
Improve Customer Service
Making your processes more effective will allow you to go to market faster with fewer quality control issues. Regularly analyzing key business processes, especially when they seem to be growing more costly or causing missed KPIs, is a great way to ensure that you are serving your customers to the best of your ability (and make them less likely to switch to a competitor).
Back to topHow to Conduct a Process Analysis
Research
First, learn everything you can about the process you are analyzing. The most effective way to learn about a process is by talking to people who are directly involved in it. However, make sure to talk to multiple people with different roles so you aren’t getting only one person’s potentially flawed or incomplete perspective.
Interviews aren’t the only helpful research method when conducting a process analysis. You should also review any existing process documentation and observe the process in action if possible. Surveys can be a good way to gather information from a larger number of people. Finally, you should review KPIs related to the process and note which, if any, are being missed.
Process Mapping
Once you have compiled your research and understand where the process begins, where it ends, and all the steps in between, the next part of process analysis is to map it out visually.
Creating a visual process map allows you to understand the entire process at a glance and makes it easy for any stakeholder participating in the process analysis to understand exactly what’s going on, even if they haven’t done the same level of research as you have.
One of the most common methods for mapping out a business process is business process modeling notation, or BPMN. This is a specific diagramming standard for business processes, and provides consistency across all use cases and audiences.
You don’t have to use BPMN — a simple flowchart or swimlane diagram can also help you visualize the process.
Identify Areas of Improvement
Based on your process map, your research, and the inputs of your team, identify the areas that you think require improvement and start to brainstorm ways to implement those improvements. You can even mark out the specific areas for improvement on your diagram and create a new layer showing the updated process that you want to implement.
Once you have a plan in place, you’re ready to take your process to the next level and begin implementing the changes that you have identified. Repeat as needed! It’s always better to take a proactive approach to process analysis rather than letting a process fail or deteriorate before taking measures to improve it.
Back to topVisualizing Processes for Analysis & Documentation
Mapping out processes makes it easier to identify areas of improvement and plan for what the improved process will look like. Plus, a process map that you create as part of process analysis can serve as documentation for your team, leading to more effective onboarding and collaboration practices.
Gliffy is a diagramming tool that allows you to create complex process maps that visualize information an intelligent, effective way. With Gliffy, you can visualize any process, no matter how complex, directly in Confluence.
Here are a few key Gliffy features that help you add additional layers of detail and value to your process map, making it a true resource for your team as you dive into process analysis and improvement.
Layer Linking
Gliffy’s layer linking feature allows you to create dynamic diagrams with layers that can be turned on and off in the diagram viewer. This is a powerful way to visualize as-is and to-be processes for your documentation — you can turn the as-is and to-be layers of the diagram on and off to see the different flows.
Data Linking
Want to add more detail to your process map? Gliffy allows you to import CSV files directly to the Gliffy editor, so you can drag and drop data points into your diagram. Not having to switch tools or manually type information makes it faster and easier to add details about parts of the process alongside the steps of the diagram.
Back to topVisualize Any Process With Gliffy
Visualize as-is and to-be processes directly in Confluence and dive into process analysis. Diagramming with Gliffy in Confluence Cloud or Data Center is free for 30 days!