As part of my time working at Lowe’s Home Improvement, I took on the task of helping to redesign the processes, systems, and teams of an entire department. Working closely with an outside consultant, I mapped the stage gates, activities, ownership, and dependencies of over 100+ people and their jobs. Our objective was to reduce work redundancy, increase speed and quality of execution, and improve clarity.

Audit & Interviews
I co-lead dozens of interviews alongside the outside consultant, asking questions to understand current behavior and processes. As you can imagine, there were times when the stories didn’t add up, and that became part of the uncovering.

Problem Solving
Insights from the interviews and internal audit were integral to defining new working objectives. These objectives became the yard stick to measure our ideas.

Process Mapping
I independently mapped all activities, owners, and dependencies in a compiled PPT document. These pages were also printed at full size and pinned to the walls in a dedicated project room. It was important to make sure that the maps were understandable and accurate in each iteration.

Activation
It wasn’t enough to make a pretty new map, I spent hours onboarding all stakeholders to the new process and pressure testing the changes. Beyond agreement, we had to make sure the new process would actually work. This included a trial period of activation, in which we said “go” and then checked on how the process was being run in real time. Did we achieve the stated goal?