Expand on your Checklists to Automate your Business

In a previous post, I talked about the importance of checklists. Checklists are a very simple tool used to keep track of the most tedious processes. I like to take multiple checklists and processes and put them in flow charts or swim lanes to better understand how a business operates. This may require a little more thinking and strategy than creating a checklist however, embracing this exercise will uncover opportunities to optimize processes. Additionally, this is another piece of documentation that will help onboard and train new employees.

Again, the piece of software you choose to document these processes doesn’t really matter. Visio, LucidChart, Confluence, and several free tools will allow you to map out swim lanes or create a flow chart. My approach is typically to create a swim lane for each department. Within the swim lane, I use color-coding to indicate a person or automation responsible for the task.

Common flows include employee onboarding, quote-to-cash processes, product releases, marketing campaign creation, etc. Oftentimes these flows are owned by a specific department, however, they require assistance from other departments. While HR may own an employee onboarding process, they may require input from an IT department or an employee’s manager regarding needed hardware and software. Additionally, they likely need assistance from other departments to train an employee. It’s ok to lay out multiple versions of a swimlane and build the flow on top of them.

Once these flows have been created it may be useful to link the checklists to the relevant steps in the flow. Within an employee onboarding flow, there may be a checklist for required paperwork, required hardware, orientation meetings, training, etc. This is likely the case with most flows. Unless you run a one-person company, it’s safe to assume that there will be handoffs between processes.

In the next post, I’ll talk about how to take these processes and prioritize them for automation.