The promise nobody likes to make
Every process workshop we have sat in ends the same way. The flip chart is photographed, the sticky notes are peeled off the wall in roughly the right order, and someone says the sentence everyone was waiting for: "I will put this into a proper model and send it round."
Nobody likes making that promise, because everyone in the room knows what it costs. The person who made it will spend an evening or two with a modelling tool, the photos and their memory. The people who own the process will receive a diagram by email, open it between two other tasks and reply "looks fine" to a model they have not really read. The workshop was the interesting part; the deliverable arrives when the interest has moved on.
The workshop is where the knowledge is. The model is produced somewhere else, later, by someone who has to remember.
What gets lost between the room and the model
The honest answer is: most of what made the workshop worth holding.
Details that only exist in the moment
A workshop is full of sentences that never make it onto the flip chart. "Well, officially it goes to procurement, but in practice I call a colleague there directly." "That check only happens when the amount is high, but nobody has written down what high means." "We skip that step on Fridays because the system is being backed up." These are the exceptions, the workarounds and the undocumented decision rules, and they are exactly the parts an auditor, an improvement project or an automation team needs most.
They are said once, in passing, while someone else is already talking about the next step. They are on the recording, which nobody will listen to again. By the time the modeller sits down with the photos, the happy path is all that is left, because the happy path is what fits on a flip chart.
The second review that never happens
The model that is sent round is a translation. The modeller has turned the sticky notes into lanes, gateways and tasks, and in doing so has made a dozen small decisions: which role owns a step, whether a question is a decision or a note, where a path ends. Those decisions would be easy to check in the room. By email, they are invisible. The process owners see a clean diagram and have no way of telling which parts are what they said and which parts are what the modeller assumed.
So the review that should happen, the one where the people who run the process read every lane and say "no, that is wrong", quietly does not happen. The diagram is signed off by silence.
What changes when the diagram grows during the workshop
The alternative is not a better modeller or a longer workshop. It is to let the diagram grow in the room, while the group is talking, so that the model is the thing on the wall rather than the thing promised afterwards. That is what patchley is built to do: it listens to the conversation, drafts the diagram as it goes and, with responses switched on, asks follow-up questions. Three things change.
- The people who own the process correct it while they still remember. A step in the wrong lane is spotted by the person whose lane it is, in the moment, not a week later by someone who was not there.
- Open questions are asked in the room, not by email a week later. When the diagram shows a decision without a rule, the question is "what makes the amount high?", and the person who knows is sitting at the table.
- The analyses and the deck are built from the same diagram, not retyped. The pain points mentioned in passing are attached to the step they belong to; the control step that was described is marked as one; the deck for the steering committee is filled from what the room agreed.
When the diagram is on the wall, the review is the workshop. There is no second version to send round, because the people who own the process have already read the first one.
The sign-off still has to be explicit. patchley proposes; the group decides, and every version stays, so the version that is confirmed at the end of the workshop is the version the analyses and the deck refer to. What disappears is the gap in between.
What this does not solve
A diagram that grows in the room is only as good as the room. If the person who really runs the process was not invited, the exceptions she knows about are still missing, and no amount of asking back will find them. If the group describes the process as it is supposed to run rather than as it runs, the diagram will faithfully show the supposed version. The questions that bring the real process out are a separate craft; we have written them down on the process capture page.
It also does not replace the modelling conventions an organisation already has. The diagram leaves as BPMN 2.0 XML and opens in the standard tools, where it can be tidied to the house style. What it should not need is to be rebuilt from photographs.
The point of the workshop was never the flip chart. It was the agreement in the room. Making the diagram the deliverable means the agreement leaves the room in a form that people and tools can read.