Whether you are a new employee in a company or new to the team, the processes and procedures followed in a company are always new and tough initially. The ease of adherence to any process or guideline is not easy when you start with it though it becomes a routine part of the life after a period of practice. But this initial period is the most difficult part of being a starter and learning to cope up with it is an integral part of improving your productivity and efficiency.

What are processes?

Processes are standard guidelines or workflows that are defined for the execution of certain functionality or for addressing certain issues. Every team or organization comprises of processes that will help them provide services and solutions of high quality and standards.

What is a Process Walkthrough?

Process Walkthrough is the activity by which a member of a team or an organization is provided knowledge on the processes and regulations crucial to the working of the team or organization. This helps in easy identification of the workflow and processes involved in the organization for the starter. Normally leads and managers of a team or project have a prior prepared plan for starters who join the team about the processes and procedures available.

Why is it necessary to understand the processes of an organization?

A process defines the way an organization works towards achieving its goals and visions. When proper adherence to the process is not done, it leads to loopholes and reduction in quality. This will not only bring down the level of customer satisfaction but will also de-motivate the employee and will further degrade his work. This is the main reason which calls for high importance to understand the processes of a company and to follow them as per guidelines.

Knowledge about processes is also important so as to support the project or the product development at times of crisis. For example, in the absence of a key resource, the need to fix a production bug will not be possible unless the other team member understands the procedures from the process documentation. These reasons state the necessity for starters to understand the processes and guidelines of their team or organization.

How to get acquainted with the processes

Understanding and getting acquainted with a process is a series of 5 steps that needs to be done with utmost care so as to make sure that there are no hiccups with the process implementation in future.

Step 1: Start with taking out time to understand the goals and visions of your organization. Most of the time, the processes revolve around the organizational views and goals. Hence understanding these would help in easy understanding of the process.

Step 2: Talk to senior members or leaders who are well aware of the process and try to get an idea around the process implementation. A short background and reasoning about the process will be of use when you learn about the process.

Step 3: Acquire documents and business case studies that relate to the process so as to learn the details completely. Learning processes through available case studies and recorded interviews will help in knowing the exact reason for which it was made.

Step 4: Analyze related data and measures that add value to your understanding of the process. Such kind of data can be extracted from previous implementation experiences of the process. In cases where the process has not been used yet, you can check out for sample data that was created during the process formulation.

Step 5: Analysis of data on the key measures will also help you to assess the stability and capability of the process. The assessed stability and process capability can be used to figure out any exceptional causes or situations that have been designed for the process.

Process understanding will no longer be a tough job as you have understood the need for a process walk through and the ways in which it can be done even if you are a starter.