Map your processes

Process mapping gives everyone a shared view of how a business operates.

This stage helps you get a clear view of how work flows through your organisation and where it involves people, data or technology. It also supports early planning for AI and helps you begin understanding the risks, limits and benefits in your own context.

Use the template and examples to document your business processes.

Start with a single business process that meets these criteria:

• High volume – it happens often enough that improvements will have real impact.
• Pain point – staff, clients or customers often experience frustration with it.
• Data-rich – it involves information that AI could potentially process.
• Contained – it has clear start and end points.

Examples of processes:

Retail customer returns inventory stocking customer enquiries

Consultancy client onboarding proposal creation invoicing

Hospitality booking management customer feedback roster scheduling

Healthcare appointment scheduling patient intake referral processing

When you’ve chosen a process, work out how much time, effort and resourcing it takes from start to end. Include details for each step of the process, in the order it happens. For example:

• action – what happens at the start of the step
• who – the person, role or system responsible
• inputs – what information is needed to progress
• outputs – what the result or outcome is
• time – how long the step usually takes to complete.

Why this matters

When you include the people responsible for a process, it helps ensure any AI you adopt works the way you need. It also highlights who could be affected if the process changes.

You should keep an up-to-date record of all AI systems you use. This helps you keep people informed and to know the risks.

Fill out Table 1 and Table 2 in the business process mapping template.

To help understand where the pain points are in the process, talk to people involved in the work. 
Some questions you could ask:

• What do you do when this process starts?
• What workarounds have you developed?
• Where do things usually get stuck or delayed?
• What information do you wish you had at each step?
• What would make your job easier here?

Outline the common issues for each step. For example:

• bottleneck – steps where work slows or stalls
• rework – steps that often need to be repeated
• waiting – delays between steps
• manual data entry – typing information that already exists elsewhere
• inconsistency – the same task done in different ways
• information gap – missing data that prevents progress
• over-processing – more effort than the task needs.

Why this matters

Talking with the people who are part of a process helps you understand how they might be affected by an AI system. Also giving staff practical AI training:

• builds confidence
• makes adoption easier
• helps the people who make the decisions get the skills they need.

Fill out Table 3 in the business process mapping template.

You should now have a complete process document map that you'll use in the next stage. Come back and complete this stage for as many processes as you need.