Key Points

• Lean Process Mapping is a fantastic way to handle incident responses.
• The hope is that by using this process, teams in organizations of all sizes will learn to move fast to reduce incident response times.
• It’s important to remember that Lean Process Mapping isn’t designed to be complex, but responsive so as to be acted on immediately.

In today’s fast-paced environment, it doesn’t matter if you are the head of an IT desk or someone who works in customer support, incidents can and will happen. Whether it’s a system crash that impacts inventory management or an angry customer call over a refund or return, these things can snowball and escalate if they aren’t handled properly.

The challenge is that when these things do happen, it can lead to frustrated users, lost trust, and worst case, a loss of revenue. Because of these concerns, ideas like Lean Process Mapping have evolved to help uncover hidden bottlenecks and result in cutting hours of resolution time that can positively impact everyone’s day.

What Is Lean Process Mapping?

When you think about Lean Process Mapping, this is basically a tool that comes from the Lean Thinking world and lets you draw out how a workflow can work step by step. As you model this workflow out, Lean Process Mapping helps you to immediately spot where waste and delays are occurring, so that business processes can be streamlined for more efficient and likely less expensive results.

Think of this as sketching out your workday and trying to find the shortcuts that exist to get through your email, work, and meetings to be as efficient as possible. The basis for this stems from how Toyota used to make cars in the mid-20th century, and it has been translated into the workplace through IT teams, customer service departments, and beyond.

At the core of Lean Process Mapping is Value Stream Mapping, in which an organization or a small team within that organization creates a visual diagram that showcases the whole journey of a customer service call or IT incident response step-by-step. Think of a customer complaint and how it follows all the way through to a resolution, so a company might want to mark the time started and finished, as well as how many handoffs took place.

Any time that can be shaved off in this area is going to lead to improved results across the board, especially in areas of customer loyalty and feedback.

Lean Process Mapping and Cutting Incident Response Times

If it doesn’t seem like Lean Process Mapping and cutting incident response times are a perfect match, that’s okay, as not everyone is going to see how well these two things line up. However, Lean Process Mapping does a fantastic job of laying out the steps that are needed to fix anything that turns a simple process into a multi-hour solution.

In business, it won’t come as any surprise to learn that time matters and that the faster an incident can be responded to and fixed, the better off the entire organization is. In addition, incidents are often urgent, so being able to map out the full path from the first alert to the appropriate fix is critical. The hope with Lean Process Mapping and cutting down incident response time is that you create a consistent process that results in less chaos overall.

This is especially true for companies in the tech and service sectors, where Lean Process Mapping has already been shown to reduce incident response times thanks to Lean’s waste-cutting roots. For better or worse, Lean Process Mapping fits with today’s world of 24/7 demands, and in turn, it helps teams handle crises that can and will arise in a calmer and more efficient manner, so simple problems don’t turn into outright disasters.

What Are The Challenges with Incident Responses?

While it all sounds easy, there are challenges with Lean Process Mapping and incident response times, as it’s not expected to be a simple fix all the time. The hope is that you can always spot the problem, fix it, and move on, but if this were how all things worked, almost none of these business processes or methodologies would be necessary.

Instead, you have to navigate this area by thinking about how to handle too many handoffs taking place in the customer service world. Alternatively, what if you need approval from a supervisor while trying to fix an urgent IT issue, and that supervisor isn’t available or is out of the building for some reason?

All of this can lead to stressed teams and a backlog that just grows and grows over a short period of time, making everything feel more pressing and urgent. Even these incidents, which may or may not be super common, stem from having hidden inefficiencies already in place. The worlds of IT and customer service, to stick with our two most likely examples, require fast-paced solutions or risk losing revenue and customer trust.

How to Best Cut Incident Response Times Using Lean Process Mapping

Mapping the Full Response Flow

When you start with Lean Process Mapping, it begins by looking at the entire incident journey and what that flow looks like. This means what happens from the very first alert or acknowledgment that an incident is taking place to the final check-in to verify that everything has been resolved.

What you are looking for is the flow of every step, whether it’s something like logging a ticket or sending an email to the right people, as well as identifying where time is wasted. The goal of mapping everything is that if you don’t do it this way, having a scattered view all but guarantees something is going to get missed.

The ultimate goal is to look at the big picture, so every member of every team can see a 10,000-foot view that has clear labels and times that match the reality of what is taking place or has already taken place.

Identifying and Removing Waste

With a map in hand, you can now look at how to hunt for waste, like removing unnecessary emails from the process or stopping repeated data entry points that just add to delays. Start trimming anything that isn’t necessary or relevant to the current incident, and if you can, combine approval steps to create one large check-in, which could free up minutes that matter.

By spotting waste, you can likely find at least a 20-30% boost in time and energy, without losing any of the quality in conversation that is necessary to resolve an issue. The takeaway by removing these steps is that you have a Lean process map that has fewer steps, and has already been tested, under pressure, to ensure that it leads to quicker resolutions.

Streamlining Handoffs and Communication

Mapping any incident response process is going to reveal clunky handoffs, this much we’ve already covered. This could mean something like passing a response ticket between teams that lacks the right amount of context. It’s something like this that opens the door to redesigning the map to ensure that any handoff feels incredibly smooth.

The reason to streamline is that it’s expected that any delays or passes between teams, to add a football analogy, could lead to at least a 30% (or greater) delay in the successful completion of the incident. You might look at this as considering success, meaning that there are fewer lost in translation errors, and feedback between the various teams involved in an incident response is that they feel connected.

If you have a response team that comes together like a well-rehearsed team, this means faster fixes, less frustration, and the likelihood that there isn’t a strong drop in either customer satisfaction or daily profits.

Building Continuous Improvement Loops

After you get deep into the mapping process, it’s important to set up regular reviews to look at how real incidents should be a guide toward making tweaks to the map. Do you need to add a step or remove one? The map should be a living, breathing guide that is continuously improved as necessary to refine incident responses.

The process should be fresh and adaptable to new tools, especially in light of things like digital transformations or automation, where new technology is making big changes in the workplace. Static processes often mean more lag time, so another measure of success might be updating the incident response map every quarter, or twice a year, with metrics that show consistent improvements in resolution times.

Key Tools to Track Lean Process Mapping

Unsurprisingly, Value Stream Mapping is at the top of the list as a primary tool for tracking Lean Process Mapping. For anyone unfamiliar with Value Stream Mapping, Lean Process Mapping is basically a flowchart that has boxes for steps, arrows for flow, and timelines for waits, drawn either on paper or with software, and it creates an easy-to-follow process to guarantee things are getting done.

Another appropriate tool or process is that of a Kaizen event, in which workshops are utilized to map and fix one process on the map. This might be something like a half-day session to streamline the alerts that take place when an incident first begins. The hope is that every Kaizen event means fresh eyes and a focus that allows for quick wins.

The Benefits of Lean Process Mapping

At the end of the day, the benefits of Lean Process Mapping for incident response are that you are focused on cutting these response times by as much as 50%. This might sound crazy, but if you can implement the right steps, in stages, properly, it’s not unexpected to see response times slashed by as much as 50%.

This could mean that you are turning hours-long fixes into minutes and week-long fixes into a 24-hour turnaround. The result is that you have happier customers, as well as there being less risk to the bottom line.

Of course, don’t forget that teams that are better integrated with a shared view of how to respond to an incident because of Lean process Mapping are also going to see a morale boost instead of panicking every time something doesn’t go the right way.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

When you jump into the world of Lean Process Mapping, the first thing you have to do is recognize that this isn’t something you can solve overnight. Thankfully, you can learn even more to become a quick expert in this space by diving into understanding how Lean can reduce wait times by half.

In addition, you might want to freshen up on other topics, you can explore how to keep retail growth on target with Hoshin Kanri. Alternatively, look at Kanban Unlocked and how to visualize the work you are doing to see where there are immediate pro