Why is this important?

Make sure the team has a clear- and mutual perception about what process we will talk about. Do not go over this to fast!

The chosen NAME is often the result of the first ‘team-synchronisation’. 

Be as specific as possible: 

• ‘Customer Complaint’ is not a process!
• ‘Handling a customer complaint’ is better…
• ‘From customer complaint to happy customer’ sets already a certain mindset.

Use this stage to bind your team.

Don’t forget to write the name on the form! 

 What if we have no clue what the process looks like? 

Make a “bird’s eye view” 

A bird’s eye view describes the process stages (or merely the process’ structure) in 5 or 10 main steps. It helps to get a quick overview for what is happening in the process. It might look like this:

The birds-eye view describes the main stages in the process. This will probably also reveal the basic structure of the process: In the example above we see a simple sequence of steps with some loops.

Other structures might be:

•  a ‘fork’ or Y shaped process: The process splits in two directions.
• A ‘spider’ process: One actor controls the process; after every step it returns to the same actor.

Check whether everybody agrees this is what we are going to dig into, and do not stay too long in this stage. An hour should be móre than enough.