As a business evolves and grows, documentation can diverge from actual operations without proper maintenance, subtly impacting key aspects of your business and ultimately reducing flexibility in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Our Services
For each process, we recommend producing or updating the following artifacts that can be adapted to your organizational standards.
Process One-Pager
An easy to understand high-level representation of the entire process with a target audience of department leadership and compliance groups.
We use a graphical workflow diagram that includes:
- Summarized processing steps representing the complete process
- Complete dependencies for each step
- All processing decision points (conditional logic)
- All data ETL (Extract Transform Load) activities
Processing Memos
Aligning leadership, management, and individual contributors with detailed instructions for a section of the processing.
Each processing memo is:
- Developed by management and individual contributors
- Reviewed and approved by leadership and management
- Includes background details of how the processing fits in the larger scope
- Detailed instructions on how the processing is completed
- Scope includes quality control, error thresholds, criteria for escalation to leadership, and control activities
Boundaries
Ensuring agreement on where a process ends and other processes begin.
We use the standard SIPOC diagram which lists:
- All Suppliers and Inputs
- All Outputs and Consumers
Data Traceability One-Pager
An easy to understand high-level representation of the data processing for all inputs to a process with a target audience of department leadership and management, upstream process owners, and compliance groups. This service is not a replacement for Data Lineage (column level data tracing).
We use a graphical workflow diagram that includes:
- All data source systems
- A summary of each ETL step
Data Integrity
Whether to support ongoing Data Governance efforts or after periods of growth, data rich environments often need improvements in data integrity. If you need assistance maintaining or enhancing the integrity of your data, then we extend the process boundary and data traceability documentation with required detail on data sources.
Our data source documentation includes:
- Environment (specific details on the data source)
- Origin (database, csv, …)
- Source detail (connection string, file structure, …)
- Workflow (processing instructions)
- Metadata
- Data dictionary (meaning of imported data elements)
- Existing controls
Service Benefits
With updated and accurate documentation, the department will see an immediate impact on quality and the workforce positively impacting future organizational enterprise programs and projects.
Leadership & Transparency
Improve decision making by accounting for formerly undocumented processing steps and hidden cross-process dependencies.
- Programs and projects will have more accurate estimates and achievable delivery dates
- Change initiatives will account for the associated complexity and impact on cross-process integration
Knowledge Management & Transfer
Lower operational variance by eliminating the fragmentation of knowledge.
- Link processing to the documentation and decouple it from the memory of individuals
- Eliminate key person dependency in training
Quality Control & Production Support
Reduce operational errors by improving cross-process integration, communication, and testing.
- Reduce production issues by having upstream process owners include downstream data consumers in testing cycles
- Identify and resolve production issues faster using accurate and actionable documentation
Allocations & Workforce
Account for formerly undocumented processing and the associated under-allocation of resources.
- Update staffing profiles to include formerly hidden work
- Reduce burnout and improve morale with more realistic staffing profiles
