Business Process Management Center

Analyze and Improve Processes

The payoff of Business Process Management comes when you start to actually improve a flawed process. This is where you begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel—the connection between your redesigned process and the real-world results: customer satisfaction, increased productivity, and a better bottom line.

The following four diagrams start to bridge the gap between analysis and a better process.

Affinity Diagram

An old-fashioned brainstorming session is still one of the best ways to generate a lot of ideas about solutions to your problem. But how do you organize the results of the brain-dump? An affinity diagram can help.

Affinity Diagrams are sometimes also referred to as the KJ method (named after their inventor: Kawakita Jiro). While they were not originally intended to be a quality management tool, they have become widely used to help quality teams group related ideas and make sense of the raw results of a brainstorming session.

Armed with a list of brainstormed ideas, create a few large rectangles on your page. Start grouping ideas that seem to belong together. Once every idea is placed somewhere in a rectangle, create titles for each affinity group. Take a look at smaller groups and see if they can be grouped with others. Should larger sets be broken down into smaller groups?

Using the Affinity Diagram you can link related causes, which can be helpful in constructing a Cause and Effect Diagram later.

SmartDraw provides a number of Affinity Diagram templates you can simply click on and customize, but you can also create your own in just a few seconds by dragging and dropping some boxes to the page and typing your ideas right into them.