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👋 Welcome to Coda’s process mapping workbook.
In this workbook, we guide you through mapping a process from end to end, helping you streamline your business operations, maximize productivity, and, ultimately, build transformational Coda docs.
Getting started
What is process mapping?
A process map is a planning and management tool that describes the flow of work. It is useful for understanding and documenting how a process works, identifying inefficiencies, and finding opportunities for improvement. It provides a clear and concise overview of the process, allowing stakeholders to analyze and streamline it effectively.
Once complete, a process map will show:
The Coda method
This workbook will take you step by step through aligning on every aspect of a process when preparing to create build in Coda. When done correctly, process mapping is hard; expect to invest some time running through these activities. Smaller processes may be mapped in as little as 30 minutes, while larger, cross functional processes can take days to fully flush out.
This workbook is designed to extract the level of detail needed to create a Coda doc. By the end of this workbook, you will have a written and clear understanding of the following aspects of the process:
The workbook is split into 8 activities, each building on the work done in the previous steps.
The first thing to do when mapping a new process is to brainstorm: what are all the tasks involved in this process? Who are all the players and stakeholders involved? Order and task owners are not important in this stage. Just focus on identifying the “who”s and the “what”s of the workflow.
This step focuses on identifying the order in which tasks are done. You’ll re-order your brainstorm list chronologically, adding in any tasks you may have forgotten. These tasks are now the steps in your process.
Once the steps of the process have been established, you will examine each step individually, diving into the nitty gritty details of exactly what is happening. The goal here is to identify who is adding new information, who is making changes to information, and who is looking at information at every point in the process. You’ll also identify steps in the process where stakeholders should be notified, making sure everyone is kept on the same page and up to speed.
Efficient processes have well designed handoffs. Here, you’ll examine how a process progresses and how stake holders in each step will know it is their time to jump into action.
This step focuses on thinking through any reporting or analysis that needs to be run on the process and ensuring that you have accounted for all of the information needed to create them.
Here, we finalize the list of information that will be used and stored in your process. As you progress through the mapping process, you will be adding, reordering and deleting details as you iterate on your workflow. This step focuses on double checking that, after all the changes you’ve made, the flow of information into and out of your process makes sense.
Checkpoint
Meet with a braintrust of end users to assess the work you’ve done so far.
Once your information list is finalized, you’ll assess who should have what access to each data point. Your goal here is to identify what restrictions need to be put in place to ensure the security of sensitive information.
Now that you’ve got a clear understanding of what you’re doing, you can start to think about how and where you are going to do it. You need to identify where each step of your process will take place: will you build everything in Coda or will your users do some tasks in other tools?
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Ready to begin?
Need help?
Process mapping can be complicated for cross functional or complex processes. If you would like assistance, consider partnering with one of our Coda experts.
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