This page is a work in progress, part of a multi-year effort to capture and share learnings, frameworks, tools, and processes to run organizations. See Running Organizations for more.

A Process is a sequence of activities that turn inputs into outputs. Business process is how the work in your organization gets done. Process is considered to be "the white space" on an org chart, as it's how value is created, independent of your formal organizational structure. Formalizing and improving business processes is how you create consistency in a business.

Processes determine business performance - we're only as good as our processes. If your processes are inefficient, inconsistent, and don't produce value, then you'll have poor performance. If your processes are efficient, consistent, and drive value, you have an advantage in the market.

There are three types of processes in a business - Management Processes that guide the organization, Core Processes where value is created, and Support Processes that enable value creation.

When we talk about improving business processes, we're mostly talking about improving Core Processes.

Management processes are the strategic plans, the monitoring, and managing of performance in an organization. Management processes set the direction and govern the organization.

Core processes are the processes that create direct value for customers. This is where product and service outputs are produced. Core processes lead to customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

All of your management processes and support processes serve to supply the organization's core processes. If management passes down stringent policies that limit account managers, core processes are compromised. If IT doesn't deliver the right tech infrastructure, customer support can't satisfy customers.

Support processes resource the core processes of the business. These are HR processes, finance processes, IT processes, and other areas that support the operation of the business but do not create direct value for customers.

Process creation is an art, not a science. You can break down many "layers" of processes and sub-processes in a large enterprise. A small business might have one layer of process. How you think about levels of processes is up to how sophisticated and complicated the business is to run.

Beyond levels of processes, there are three key layers that underlie a business process - Procedures, Tasks, and Work Instructions.

Most organizations have 20-30 processes that run the entire business, and a handful of processes are truly critical to value creation. Each process can be broken down into sub-processes, and into greater levels of detail.

Processes capture at a high level what must be done, but not how to do it. The three levels below explain how to execute activities to turn inputs into outputs.

Procedures or Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are a practical, detailed list of steps taken as a part of a Process. They explain how to do the work and why it must be done.

Procedures usually take the form of a narrative and often include graphics and images. Procedures can also include checklists, which support the steps described in a Procedure, and ensure accountability that those steps get done.

Tasks are the individual steps taken as part of a Procedure. Tasks are always carried out by a single person, whereas Procedures can involve multiple people, and Processes almost always involve multiple people.

Tasks can be rolled up into a Checklist format.

Work Instructions are exact step-by-step instructions for how to complete a Task. Instructions are generally long-form written instructions that include screenshots of choices to make, buttons to click, and more.

Every organization has business processes, whether they are documented or not. If they are documented, they're considered formal business processes. If they're not documented, they're informal.

Documenting processes helps you improve your processes. Just seeing a process visually process will help you to find inefficiencies and ways to improve. Having your processes documented is a huge part of new employee training and of building and preserving company knowledge. Documentation also helps you manage risk and increase the overall market value of a business.

Support Processes and Management Processes are great candidates for a consistent, formal process. Many organizations work to cut back on Support Processes and invest more heavily in Core Processes. If you don't formalize Support Processes, you're unlikely to find ways to improve efficiency and cut costs on them.

Core Processes often require consistency to limit variation. Areas within the business where teams hand off work to one another can benefit the most from formalized processes.

Innovative and creative areas like R&D, engineering, and design often demand more variation and less consistency and therefore can get by with less formalized processes. That said, there are areas in every role that can benefit from formalized process.

Steps in a process approximate "completeness." Formal processes ensure that people execute, but following a process doesn't ensure excellence. Much of knowledge work requires the use of creativity and the exercising of judgment. The development of creativity and judgment of humans is a frontier you can't solve with procedures and checklists.

When you have just enough process, you prevent the major mistakes that could cause you to miss payroll, harm your internal culture, lead to bad product quality, or ruin a customer relationship. You can't design errors or mistakes out of an organization, and if you try, you'll kill creativity, motivation, and ultimately, the culture. But improving processes to “design out” major mistakes is key.

Formal process frees us from bandwidth-sucking tasks that limit us from thinking, creating, and creating leverage in our roles. Processes, Procedures, and Tasks should be viewed as a way to free us to do our highest value work, not oppress us.

In the book Scaling Up Excellence, the authors divide organizations into two categories: "Buddhist" and "Catholic." "Buddhist organizations" adopt a common mindset (i.e. Core Values, Operating Principles), but practices and rituals differ throughout the organization.

Four Seasons is a Buddhist organization in that they have global standards, but each location operates differently and is localized to the city it's in. "Catholic organizations" replicate their training, processes, and practices identically, in every area of the organization. In N Out Burger and Sees Candy are two examples of Catholicism - they look, feel and operate identically everywhere.

Instead of standardizing everything and enforcing consistency as a way to approximate quality, hold up the best performances as the standard and don't budge. Let teams and individuals decide how that performance will be replicated.

Use KPIs to monitor performance against that standard. KPIs, alongside people’s judgment and intuition, help you to monitor for broken windows in the neighborhood and ensure that performance doesn't backslide.

Knowledge work jobs require judgment and creativity, but not every element of our roles require those things. For those areas where variation doesn't improve the output, let teams decide how to tackle the standardization of the work.

Don't make documenting processes a management-only exercise. While your leadership team may be accountable for documenting the highest-level key processes in the business, ensure that leaders engage with management for help. Utilize frontline employees for as much documentation as possible.

Letting people own their own processes, as much as possible, empowers people.

If you train and develop people, you can get away with less process, and those people can use their skills to solve problems in real time. People who are well-trained and prepared to handle decisions with good judgment take more responsibility for outcomes and produce better outcomes than a set of SOPs ever could.

You have two basic choices:

The best strategy is somewhere in-between, but defaulting to developing people is the more humanistic approach.

In Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan proposes the idea of using Defaults rather than Standards. The use of Defaults shapes culture and sends a message, especially to new hires. For one, it ensures that new hires and junior-level talent follow the formal processes and experience early success. Second, it creates an expectation that people outgrow the Default as they gain expertise, and that they help to improve it.

When you have junior-level talent using Defaults effectively and senior-level talent creating new Defaults by consciously "breaking Defaults", you create a high-performing culture of development and innovation.

Every business has Core Processes and should have SOPs to accompany them. Not every Process needs an SOP, and not every SOP needs Work Instructions. A business that’s overly reliant on SOPs and Work Instructions creates worse problems than a lack of consistency. In The Road Less Stupid, Keith Cunningham lists the symptoms of organizations where business processes are over-engineered:

We tend to build up processes and procedures because as the organization matures, managers confuse variance and one-off issues with process or system problems, and then work to fool-proof the system.

Core Processes are where value creation happens, and in order to ensure performance, they need to be monitored for bottlenecks. Documenting your most critical processes is the first step to monitoring and improving customer value.

In the book Process!, the authors define Core Processes simply, by asking leaders to sit quietly and create a list of processes that “makes the organization consistently unique and valuable.”

What will you call the process? An agreed-upon name clarifies what the process is meant to serve. Good names are simple and easy to remember.

By assigning accountability at the Leadership level, you ensure that as you grow, no Core Processes will be ignored or forgotten.

This map gives you a birds-eye view of how the customer delivery components of the business are run. When you experience Issues, you can reference your map, see where that Issue lives, and understand how it affects downstream outputs.

There are two main ways to visualize processes - flow charts and swimlane flowcharts. Flowcharts are diagrams of the sequence of actions that take place in a process, from beginning to end. Swimlane flowcharts add swimlanes for an additional level of detail. Swimlanes are usually created to denote responsible roles or departments. Swim Lanes are great for complicated shared processes like Customer Onboarding, which involve handoffs.

Both diagrams can be created in tools like Lucidchart, Miro or a simple presentation tool. An advantage of diagramming tools is their templates and built-in notation.

Note: Business Process Model and Notation, BPMN, is a standardized graphical notation. A good resource for BPMN notations is here. Instead of figuring out how to use BPMN, use a tool with built-in notation.

This level of detail gives us an understanding of what has to be done to complete the Core Process.

In a Hiring Employees process, we may have four Subprocesses:

Each of these Subprocesses can have additional layers of Subprocesses or just associated Standard Operating Procedures (SOP).

This allows Leaders and their Managers to get on the same page about the Sub-Processes that must be managed, and how they fit into the big picture.

In Chris Ronzio’s The Business Playbook, he breaks down a categorization of Collections, Subjects, Topics, and Steps. Collections are folder groupings of Subjects (i.e. Finance & Accounting). Subjects cover single subjects (i.e. “Payroll”) and are sub-folders. Topics are your procedures (i.e. “Creating Payroll Reports”) and are usually documents, while Steps are the bullet points or headers within your Topic documents (i.e. “Reviewing Time Entries”).

The key to the successful integration of formal processes into the day-to-day operation is the link between your formal process and people’s everyday tasks. By linking the documentation (high-level files, folders, documents, and videos) to the actual tasks, you get people following Defaults in the way they were designed.

Template your common projects and tasks/task templates in a project management platform like Asana, Monday.com, Jira, etc, and create links within those tasks to your Processes, Procedures, and Work Instructions.

The EOS approach to documenting processes is to write out processes across each core function of the organization. EOS suggests spending one hour with the Leadership Team to identify what the Core Processes in the organization are, and what they're called.

Scaling Up takes a similar approach to focusing on Core Processes. They suggest gathering the Leadership Team to list out the 4-9 Core Processes in the business, assigning accountability for each process to a specific person, and then designing KPIs for each process.

Shannon Susko's approach roughly follows the Scaling Up approach but uses a tool called the Key Function Flow Map (KFFM), which assigns an accountable Leadership Team member to each process. The KFFM is well-detailed in this article.

The commonalities across these approaches are in:

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) create consistency in the operation. They're necessary for detailing how to execute repetitive work that demands consistency and doesn't require high levels of judgment and creativity.

Written procedures help in training, give answers to common questions, and thereby help to streamline organizational communication.

It's easy to default to creating SOPs to "fill the gaps," but you do not need SOPs for every Core Process. You want just the right amount of SOPs for Core Processes such that you avoid major mistakes and make people's lives easier.

Instead of building SOPs when you run into problems, and just gradually adding more and more SOPs, create SOPs when you anticipate that they can prevent catastrophic errors or when there are clear Issues that a new SOP would resolve.

SOPs are highly detailed and subject to frequent change. Updating SOPs is a manager accountability, but keeping them up to date should be everyone's responsibility.

As new hires begin to take on work and find problems and inconsistencies with your SOPs, ask them to contribute to changing them (or log suggestions for changes). This is a great way to set the tone of a continuous improvement culture and gives managers fodder for appreciation and recognition early in an employee's journey with the organization.

In the Subprocess example, we used Hiring Employees as the Core Process, with Subprocesses for Recruiting Candidates, Interviewing Candidates, Making Offers, and Planning Employee Onboarding. For a Subprocess like Interviewing Candidates, we may have five SOPs:

Make SOPs consistent in format and style and easily consumable and understandable by the people using them. SOPs are only useful if they're easy to use.

While Processes are often best expressed visually, SOPs require step-by-step explanation and need to be expressed in written form, usually as long-form writeups in a version-controlled tool like Google Docs.

For simple procedures, a numbered list of steps is likely all you need to guide to a user to complete a procedure.

For more complex procedures, you might need to show sub-steps and hierarchy. You can also use flowcharts to show how a decision leads to a different set of steps. These longer-form documents might include headers and a table of contents.

Work Instructions and their associated Tasks are optional components of Processes but can be very helpful for detailing repetitive, non-intuitive steps in a Procedure. Work Instructions are job aids that help train new employees and get them producing in your organization quickly.

In our example of Hiring Employees (Process), our Subprocess of Interviewing Candidates included an SOP for Screening Candidates, which could include Work Instructions for:

A given Task within that Work Instruction could be:

Work Instructions should be created by experts who know how to execute the Tasks that satisfy the SOP. Instructions need to be updated frequently and should be managed by staff, not by Management.

Screenshots can be particularly helpful in showing how to navigate SaaS user interfaces to complete a series of Tasks. Stick to short, simple sentences and use labels and annotations on screenshots in documents.

Video explainers can be even more helpful, but need to be re-shot every time a platform changes or a button moves, as opposed to a long-form document of screenshots that can be quickly edited.

When following instructions, we tend to delegate our judgment or intuition, so missing a key step can undermine the entire Procedure. In long-form Work Instruction documents, use bold, italics, reds, and greens to emphasize key points and ensure that the person carrying out tasks doesn't miss a step.

Process! breaks down three types of measurement for Procedures: compliance, frequency, and outcomes. Compliance means ensuring that a person completed a step. Frequency is checking to see how often the step is completed. Outcomes is about verifying that it’s delivering results.