If you want to design your business so that it provides the best possible experience for your customers, you have to think about the customer process. People go through the same steps every time that they look for a product to help them satisfy one of their basic needs. By understanding these steps or processes, you can better understand the customer and come up with ways to better serve the people who buy from you.

A recent survey by the non-profit Business Performance Management (BPM) Forum found that 68 percent of businesses consider the bottom line - increasing revenue and optimizing profit - to be key factors in improving their business's efficiency. This should come as no suprise, since improved efficiency results in cost savings and better performance.

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Project managers have many tools in their toolkit. PMs who combine Lean and Six Sigman thinking and tools with project management techniques become an unbeatable combinatgion.

Project management uses five basic steps to define and complete a project:

• Initiate--Select project, define initial scope

• Plan--Establish schedule, budget, team, risk, communications, project management plan

• Execute--Work the plan

• Monitor and Control--Quality control, monitor schedule/budget, corrective actions

It’s all well and good to say that your organization is process oriented. Sure, everyone knows how to do things. It says so right in the manual that everyone has on the shelf. But how long has it been since you and your employees really paid attention to what they do? Do they truly understand the processes they follow? Do they know how each one relates to the others? Are they aware of the inputs required or the outputs that result from their process? Is your organization truly process driven?

Business process mapping embodies the belief that seeing is believing. While we all have varying levels of familiarity with our organization’s processes, it’s not until we see each step broken down and placed in a visual guide that we understand exactly what each function is, and its impact on the rest of the organization.