So how does the SIPOC save me? This is an awfully bold claim, Cotton. After all, it’s a simple acronym and it’s pretty intuitive. It’s “I can’t believe consultants are highly paid to do this with us” simple. Well I’m a recent convert myself. As a baby six-sigma practitioner, my teammates raved about the SIPOC (like you probably did when you tried Thai food for the first time) but I just didn’t see it. Isn’t it just spicier Chinese? And then I was engaged on an uber-complicated 9-figure multi-year project that sought to redesign and move ancient processes that predated Lincoln (the president and the car) into modern workflow and integration technology. The team put “product manager” and “business analyst” hats on the army of SMEs to sort out the mysterious processes and write user stories, but alas they knew the processes TOO well, and we desperately needed to pull them out of the weeds to be productive. And the weeds were ugly from years of adding layers of complexity to meet customer needs. So in this environment process design meetings continued but progress wasn’t being made.

I was asked to join one to see if I could help, and what was amazing was the realization that conversations were happening about the process with people who all had a different definition of the process. Because of a few factors no one was stopping the train to call out and resolve these differences. So I did. I put up a SIPOC template on the whiteboard, asked for 30 minutes to drive it out, and the exercise exposed broad disagreement on what process we were supposed to working on! Fortunately the SIPOC got them back on track and we made it a required deliverable early on for all other project teams.

I have yet to work on a project where time was cheap. The SIPOC will save you soft dollars for your employees AND hard project dollars for your contractors. Next time you are defining process for a project give it a try!