Practice Mapping: Question the obvious. Deliver the best.

Practice Mapping: Question the obvious. Deliver the best. Practice Mapping illustration © 2022 Debi Prasad Mahapatra. Click or tap to view large.

Practice Mapping

Practice Mapping is about taking a pause and questioning what appears obvious, what feels obvious, what we believe we know, and what we believe we do in the context of our work. 

Many failures can be avoided by questioning the obvious, without missing or sacrificing opportunities for experimentation and learning. Questioning the obvious is fundamentally about checking if we are doing the right things, if we are doing those things right, and ultimately making that check a continuous thing. 

How often should the Practice Mapping cycle be repeated? Once in 6 months? Once in a year? Once in a quarter? Well, you, as a team, experiment, discover and decide what works for you. And, of course, as you go through a few cycles of Practice Mapping exercise, most of the steps in the exercise will start to take significantly less time and effort. Even though the Process Mapping exercise is primarily for teams, it could potentially be used for bigger composite entities like departments, business units, product lines, business subsegments etc.

Step 1: Visualise workflow

Create a visual representation of your workflow. This step is not needed if you already have a visual representation of your workflow. Just use what you have or improve that if needed.

Step 2: Analyse workflow

Take a very close and detailed look at the visual representation of your workflow to clearly identify each of the activities involved in your workflow. Do this step. Don’t assume that you already have the clearest or strongest possible understanding of your workflow. Do this step together as a team. Encourage conversations, questions, and clarifications to arrive at a shared or common understanding. If you had recently done this, it’s going to take lesser time and effort. But resist the urge to skip this step.

Step 3: Identify practices

In the light of the understanding so gained or strengthened in Step 2, identify all the practices that are in force around your workflow. If you don't have one already, creating a visual representation of your all your practices is very useful. Ultimately, it's about Practice Mapping :-). Again, do this step together as a team. Encourage conversations, questions, and clarifications to arrive at a shared or common understanding. Think and discuss about all the practices: ‘engineering practices’, ‘people practices’ etc.

Step 4: Survey

In the light of the practices identified in the previous step, build a Practice Mapping questionnaire and share that with each of your team members. An example of a Practice Mapping questionnaire is available on this page. It’s just an example for illustration. Your questionnaire could look entirely different depending on your context. Of course, if you already have a Practice Mapping questionnaire in place, just use that to get the survey done. Revise the questionnaire if needed.

Step 5: Discover weak practices

Consolidate and analyse the responses from the team members to identify the weak areas in your practices. Do this identification of the weak areas together as a team. Encourage honest conversations, questions, and clarifications to arrive at a shared or common understanding. If no weak practice gets identified, stop at this step.

Step 6: Identify changes

In the light of the identified weak practice areas, identify changes to those weak practice areas. Do this identification of ‘changes’ together as a team. Encourage conversations, questions, and clarifications to arrive at a shared or common understanding.

Step 7: Implement changes

Implement the identified changes together as a team.

Step 8: Assess progress and check impact

Based on the cadence, utilize the Practice Mapping questionnaire to assess progress in implementation of changes identified in the weak practice areas. This is not about checking the ‘impact’ of the changes implemented. And decide on a cadence to check the impact of the changes.

Example: Practice Mapping Questionnaire

This set of questions below is a mechanism to explore how your team works. Please answer these questions as a team member. These questions are not about your individual way of working. And of course, this is not a fixed or comprehensive set of questions. This set could be useful for many contexts, and a modified set or an entirely different set could be suitable for many other contexts. Feel free to identify and experiment with the questions that you think are suitable for your context. Your questionnaire is good as long as it covers all your key practices that have an impact on your team's targeted outcomes.

• Where do you get your requirements from?
• How do you ensure that you are working against the correct requirements?
• How do you visualise workflow (how do you make your work visible)?
• Do you try to limit the number of work items that you work on at one point in time?
• If you answered yes to the above question, how and why do you limit the number of work of items that you work on simultaneously?
• What is that limit now?
• How do you ensure efficient flow of work items through your workflow?
• Do you have an identified value-stream pertaining to the work that you do?
• If you answered yes to the previous question, what’s the name of your value-stream? 
• Do you know who your customer is?
• If you know who your customer is, what’s their name?
• How frequently do you review your ‘way of working’ and processes to identify improvements?
• Which mechanism do you use to review your way of working and processes?
• How frequently do you end up actually identifying improvements?
• How frequently are you successful in implementing improvements identified?
• How do you solicit feedback from your customer(s)?
• How frequently do you solicit feedback from your customer(s)?
• How do you solicit feedback from your team members?
• How frequently do you solicit feedback from your team members?
• How do you establish, maintain and strengthen collaboration?
• Who decides on what piece of work comes in?
• Who decides on how any piece of work gets done?
• Is there a standard process defined for how any type of work gets done?
• How do you plan work?
• How do you record a plan?
• How frequently planning happens?
• How do you review a plan?
• How frequently a plan gets reviewed?
• How do you review the outcome of the work done?
• How frequently do you review the outcome of the work done?
• Do you get the outcome of the work reviewed by your customer or their representative?
• If you get the outcome of the work reviewed by your customer’s representative, who are they in your case?
• How frequently your customers could benefit from a new delivery or release?
• How frequently do you deliver?
• Does your market still need what you are creating to deliver?
• What are you doing to know if your market still needs that as much as possible in advance, and before the market gives you the feedback much later that they didn't want or need that?
• Which practices encourage collaboration and a sense of belonging and comradery, and which practices don't?