Which process should we map first?
Start with the process where three things meet: it earns or protects the most, it depends on one or two people, and something about it hurts today — delays, rework, or the same questions again and again. In many SMEs that is quote to order, order to delivery, or service. Do not start with the easiest process, and do not start with all of them. Map one process end to end, capture the knowledge behind it, and let what you learn choose the second.
A short story
An installation company wanted every process mapped before the owner stepped back. Two months of workshops later, the walls were full of high-level boxes, and nothing the owner knew had been captured. People stopped coming to the sessions.
They started again with one process: quoting custom installations, where the owner still checked every large quote personally. One workshop showed the flow; three conversations with the owner captured the pricing rules and the exceptions behind them. The sales team could now prepare quotes the owner only had to confirm — and the team knew which process to take next. (An illustrative example, not a client case.)
What goes wrong when you pick the wrong first process?
- The easiest process: a clean map and a quick result, but no risk reduced. The sponsor loses interest before the process that matters comes up
- Everything at once: months of shallow mapping, no depth anywhere, and a team that associates process work with lost afternoons
- A process nobody owns: the map is finished, and every decision about it stalls
- A process in crisis: the people who know it have no time, and the map records the crisis instead of the process
How do you score your candidates?
List your core processes on one page and score each on four questions, from low to high. The process with the highest total, and an owner willing to lead it, goes first.
| Question | What you look at |
|---|---|
| Value | How much revenue, margin or customer trust runs through this process? |
| Dependency | How many steps can only one or two people do? |
| Pain | Where do delays, rework, complaints or repeated questions show up today? |
| Readiness | Is there an owner, and can the people involved make time in the coming weeks? |
What if two processes score the same?
Take the one with the nearest deadline: a retirement, a succession, a new system going live, a customer audit. A date makes time available that a score alone does not.
If there is still a tie, take the process that feeds the other. Quoting and pricing, for example, shape almost every order that follows.
How far should the first process go?
End to end, but not in every detail. Follow one real case from the first trigger to the final result, mark the decisions and hand-overs, and capture the knowledge behind the steps that depend on one or two people. Leave improvement ideas for later.
The first process is also a test of the way of working. It shows how much time the people can give, which capture methods suit them, and how quickly a map goes stale without an owner. That experience makes the second process faster than the first.
How MentX helps
MentX captures how your company really works: the knowledge of your key people and the processes they run. We offer both a hands-on service approach — mapping your processes and capturing the knowledge behind them, from meetings, workshops and a guided intake — and our own personality-aware knowledge base, with full source attribution, in your own Knowledge Space. We build on the tools you already use and add best-practice solutions where they fit.
We usually start with a one-page overview of your core processes and a discovery workshop on the one that scores highest. Then we map it end to end, capture the knowledge behind each step, and agree what comes next. How an engagement runs.
What to do this quarter
- List your core processes on one page.
- Score each on value, dependency, pain and readiness.
- Pick the highest-scoring process with a willing owner.
- Plan a discovery workshop with the people who do the work.
- Agree what “done” means for the first process: a map, the knowledge per step, an owner and a first gap captured.
