Seven People, Seven Different Ways: Why a Map Is Not Enough

A process map is not enough because it shows the steps but does not make them happen the same way twice; that requires governance. In a story John Sansbury tells, a council housing repairs contact centre had seven agents handling calls seven different ways, a full year after the process was designed, documented, trained and rolled out.

• Four artefacts bridge a map and a governed process: a RACI matrix with one and only one accountable person per activity, a swim-lane process flowchart, measurement on each step, and written procedures.
• Documented accountability is rare. In one analysis, only around 15 per cent of people in a set of departments had any documented accountability at all.
• There is only ever one process owner, accountable for policy, design and continual improvement, while managers run the process day to day. Sansbury found no process at maturity level three in one large university's IT function, because there were no process owners.
• Governance produces control, control produces consistency, and consistency is the prerequisite for optimisation. The book cites 30 per cent of revenue as the cost of putting right what should not have gone wrong. The housing centre's real failure was that the manager never went back to audit the process.