For B-end product managers, mastering some process design thinking is conducive to better functional design. From the perspective of a product manager, this article talks about the cognition, value, and operation guidance of the process, hoping to inspire you.
At the end of the year, it is also the time of precipitation, looking back on the product manager who has been in the industry for many years, and the projects he has done have been involved from C to B, from front to back. After thinking about it, I decided to talk about process design, which is important in my past experience working with several large groups, but is generally not considered a must-have competency for product managers. This article does not provide a specific project summary, nor does it discuss the design of a specific function. Only from the perspective of a product manager, let's talk about the cognition, value, and operation guidance of the process, and my personal thinking is for reference only.
Directory:
1. Overview of process management
2. Detailed process design methods
- Definition of process framework VS detailed process
- The core elements of the process document: a diagram, a table
- L5 Process Design Guidelines, Case Studies, and FAQs
- L5 process combing project planning and preparation
1. Overview of process management
1. What is the process - Misconceptions about the process perception
I believe that the product managers who read this article must have sorted out the business process, output the corresponding process documents, and have their own definition and understanding of the process. But when you detach yourself and look back at the process document you output, you can try to describe what you think the process is in a paragraph or a paragraph.
This seems to be an inexplicable consensus, as long as you mention it, you don't need to say much about it. Process is nothing more than the embodiment of steps, operations, and business behaviors, but is that all?
2. What is the process – the theoretical origin of the process
The time has come to focus on process, which is fundamentally the mechanism of value creation in our organization. —Hammer
Personally, I think that before defining what a process is, it is necessary to have a simple understanding of the application logic of process design. The above figure is a schematic diagram drawn by the author according to the SIPOC organizational system model proposed by Deming, a master of quality management, which is understood in abstract is the process of transforming an enterprise into a valuable output to customers through a series of related standards and specifications of business activities based on certain resource inputs.
This is a bit difficult to understand, but I will give an example from the perspective of a product manager, and you can understand that the process in the above diagram is a middle-office concept:
In the e-commerce industry, the product master data is obtained from the upstream PLM, PDM or MDM master data platform, and input to the operation center to execute a series of packaging activities (maintenance of product detail maps, first images, various crossed prices, listing prices, product delivery fees, saleable inventory, etc.), and then output to different front-end channels (Taobao, Pinduoduo, JD.com, Suning, Gome Electric, Vipshop, Mushroom Street, etc.) to reach users and complete the end-to-end closed loop.
Power must be put into the process, the process has power, the supreme leader has no power, the supreme leader can only do the rules. - Ren Zhengfei
Am I able to deliver value to my customers only if I have the resources to invest in it?
Generally speaking, because of the small and medium-sized enterprises because of the few positions and few people, the company's operation every front-line employee is well aware, from back-end production to channel sales, the link is not long, so when implementing business actions, there is no need for specific standard processes, because everyone knows what they want to do and how much value will be generated after doing it.
Medium and large enterprises (basically more than 1,000 people), the position setting is complex, and the responsibilities of each department and position have been subdivided to the point that it is almost equivalent to an information island, just like a mobile phone production assembly line with 200 people sitting on the screw, no one knows what kind of use scenario they will have in the follow-up quality inspection, logistics and transportation, after-sales and use experience. If there is no standard process management, then every employee only knows that this screw is in hand, and I have to make a few laps of it and quickly hand it over to the next person, even if there is a problem in the follow-up, it will not be able to locate it, let alone optimize and improve efficiency. Therefore, our definition of process can be summarized in the following two points:
- The process is process management, and only by managing the process well can we get good results;
- A process is a way to define and manage the rules of collaboration between roles within an organization. In order to facilitate readers to understand the concept of process, it can be summarized simply and crudely as: (1) across 3 or more positions, (2) recurring, and the work needs to be managed by formulating a standard process;
3. What is the process – the story of the porridge
In view of the above definition, I will give an example of porridge to supplement the value of process design.
Preset such a scene, five people who are stranded on a desert island want to share a pot of porridge, everyone scrambles for fear that they won't be able to get it, and finally overturns the pot, and everyone doesn't eat it. We try to design the flow of this porridge scene to solve this problem, and there are the following solutions:
- Write the names of five people on the stones, and whoever catches the lot will come and divide the porridge, and each person will catch it once a day
- Set up a two-person porridge distribution committee, and three judges, two people are responsible for sharing the porridge, and the other three people are responsible for evaluating whether the porridge divided by these two people is reasonable
- Five people take turns to divide the porridge, and after the porridge is divided, the one who divides the porridge chooses the porridge last
The first scheme is extremely efficient, but there may be many times when the same person catches the same person, and the person who points it deliberately gives himself more points and gives others less points; the second scheme is implemented cautiously and standardly, but the efficiency is extremely low, and the two people divide it well, and the three people go to review, and the porridge is cold and has not been eaten; the third plan, in order to ensure that they get not the least, they have to try to score as much as possible.
Of course, if it is an actual business scenario, in fact, there are more situations to consider, such as the third option, which also considers the existence of interests between the porridge divider and one of the other four people, so that he would rather be the last to take it, but also give the most porridge to a certain person, in exchange for some invisible resources, which is a very common phenomenon in large enterprises, but this article will not discuss it for the time being.
4. What is the process – the story of the parachute
Let's take another parachute example, which is also one of the more interesting stories I saw when reading other articles, which can be used in this article.
As can be seen in the figure above, in the first scenario, the parachute manufacturer always delivers the product to the customer only 99% of the pass rate, the manufacturer improves staff training, replaces high-precision production instruments, improves quality inspection specifications, and finally delivers to the customer, there is still a 1% defective rate;
So in the second scenario, we do a little optimization of the entire delivery mechanism and process, after the manufacturer delivers the parachute to the customer, the customer first extracts a few for the manufacturer to use, and after the manufacturer has no problem using it, the customer will accept it and put it into the market. In the end, in order to avoid the 1% defective rate appearing on themselves, the manufacturer finally increased the pass rate of the product to 100%.
Of course, this story is too crude and simple, and the actual scenario is not so simple, and this is just a typical case to help readers understand the value of process design. Through the above two cases, we can understand the definition of the process in depth:
- The process is the embodiment of the business process, and the management mechanism and rules are integrated in the process;
- Enterprise business process construction is to identify best practices, solidify and promote them;
brief summary
The thinking of process design is to trace back to the source and find the necessary solution to effectively solve the problem from the essential cause of the problem. In Huawei's definition, a process is a set of standardized business operation rules and mechanisms formed to achieve customer value and enterprise business goals in a specific enterprise environment and resource protection: that is, through a series of repeatable and logically ordered activities, in accordance with relevant policies and business rules, one or more inputs are converted into clear, measurable, and valuable outputs.
When the product manager conducts business analysis and product planning, the ability required is highly consistent with the thinking of process design, and no company has a company that is stagnant in business, the internal management system is complicated and redundant, and the departments are full of doctrines, and all the princes have ghosts, they will let the product manager optimize the system and make product solutions.
At that time, Ren Zhengfei of Huawei personally wrote an email to invite IBM's team to participate in the construction of Huawei's management process system, from the top-level design, to the reorganization of business processes, to the design of LTC (lead to cash) process architecture model, almost IBM brought Huawei's management level to the international stage (this part can be seen in Huawei-related books) However, it is precisely because of this that before Huawei announced the launch of the switch to fully self-developed ERP at the beginning of this year, the industry unanimously suspected that IBM had left a backdoor within Huawei......
Far from it, this article only represents the author's explanation of the definition of process design that I have come into contact with and understood in my past employment experience, and only represents my personal views, which is not the consensus of the industry, and I welcome a benign discussion. The specific process design operation methodology, the standard of process document writing, the author intends to open a new post to summarize and precipitate.
This article was originally published by @Tom Huang on Everyone is a Product Manager and is not allowed to be reproduced without permission
The title image is from Unsplash and is licensed under CC0
The views in this article only represent the author's own, everyone is a product manager, and the platform only provides information storage space services.