Sounds cool, doesn’t it?! That’s because it is. For myself, I imagine a dark, dirty mine on the side of a mountain. Men are blasting tunnels and removing ore or gold or whatever it is that’s been deemed valuable therein. It’s hard, grueling work, but the value of it is priceless. These days, mining tends to be much more precise, uses lots of big trucks, and is definitely not as romantic (in my estimation. For as romantic as mining can actually be. I digress).
Process mining may be less physical. I use the subjunctive because it really depends on what kind of processes you’re dealing with, who your mining team is, and whether everyone is on board for improvement. You can be mentally and physically exhausted through process mining, but you will most likely not be as dirty.
At its core (no pun intended), process mining is the art of studying a workflow, identifying the existing process, codifying it, and then supporting the team responsible for it in improvement efforts where necessary. Especially in start ups, young companies, or companies with very little formal structure, process mining is a critical tool for bringing the business into a place where it is prepared to grow. Without clear and stable processes, a business will find it difficult to grow without a lot of collateral damage.
Why is this? Let’s back out of the business environment for a moment and take this to a more personal level. Think about your morning routine. Likely, you’ve gotten this down pat – you may even have it timed so that you can stay in bed as long as possible. You’ve streamlined and improved that process of getting out of the house so that you can have success in your day and stay in bed. It’s a win. Now consider if you executed that process in a different way every day – what would that be like? Maybe this is, in fact the case for you, and you could use a process mining exercise to stabilize this process and stay in bed longer.
The point is that processes are unstable when they are performed a different way every time, or when each person performing the process has a different methodology. This approach is usually rife with error, inefficiency, and rework. Thus, when you introduce growth into a business with unstable processes, it will wobble in its execution because what seemed to work okay before is now required to bear more weight that the system is not designed to support.
Hopefully you can see where process mining and improvement can help you prepare your system for growth! And it isn’t scary – a lot of it is just getting in there and seeing what is, understanding where you need to go, and setting target conditions to get there. Process mining is actually very exciting, fun, and rewarding.
Activity: Consider a process you run through every day. Perhaps this is getting out of the house, making coffee, getting yourself prepared for the next day. How have you streamlined this process to sustain more weight? What happens when you have more going on, more people to make coffee for, or you have to start picking up someone else’s kids for school? Is your process stable? How might you stabilize it?