The usefulness of Checklists If you use standard 'flowchart' notation to describe how to make a cup of tea, you'll get something very linear, like this: A lot of space in a standard flowchart is taken up describing what order things should happen in. But actually, for some of the steps, the order is not that important. We certainly have to wait for kettle to boil before pouring the water into the mug, but the order in which we add milk and sugar doesn't matter. If we re-draw the process using a notation that allows for certain steps to happen in any order, we get something like this: If you look at real world business processes, you'll probably find the same thing: although there are certain steps that do have to be ordered, a lot of them can be split into 'stages' and then tackled in any order. In many cases a series of checklists is a much better model for business processes than a classic flowchart. The CRM Process Control Someone at Mic
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