 Hello, this is Brian Rowe with LS NTAP. Thank you guys so much for coming out and joining us for a webinar on Introduction to Business Process Mapping. This is a new webinar that we're doing being put on by Idealware. There will be a survey afterwards. We would love to have your feedback on this, especially since it's a new topic. If you want us to go more in depth or if it covered the things that you were looking for, we definitely want to know. Great. Thanks, Brian. It's a privilege to have a chance to do this webinar with you and all the different work that we've done with the Legal Aid community over the years. We've done a number of different training projects and also research studies and publications and other kinds of learning resources for the Legal Aid community. I want to tell you just a little bit about Idealware to start here. Idealware exists to help other nonprofits succeed with technology and make smart technology decisions. One of the kinds of decisions that we help people make is how to make the best use of the technology that they have. That is, I think, where process improvement and business process mapping come into play. If you're interested in this topic, you might also look at a recording that we have on our site about project management, which was a webinar that was done last month and that's available on our website. This is what I look like. I know you can't see me right now, but this is what I look like for you. My contact information is there. I would love to hear from you after the webinar is over if you have any additional feedback or questions for me. We also have a couple of other panelists that will be joining us today. They'll be chiming in after the first 15 to 20 minutes or so. Vivian is joining us from LAF and then Susan is joining us from Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance. I'll let them introduce themselves to you in just a little while. Here's the plan for how we're going to spend our time today and what we're going to cover. I'd like to spend about 15, maybe a couple of extra minutes on just giving you some of the basics of business process mapping. We'll tell a little story to help you enter into this. We'll cover what business process mapping is and the basics of how it works, a few tips for getting started, and then I'll bring in Vivian and Susan to talk about their experiences in legal aid organizations with business process mapping, what they stumbled on, what the challenges might have been as they were learning this, and how it helped their organization and how it worked for them. They'll be able to share a lot of great tips for you. When it comes to that point, I would love to get your questions for them so that we can really tailor this to what you are most interested in. Let's start out with kind of a made-up story, but one that is based on a real case. This is using a little bit of poetic license on a real story about LAF. They had neighborhood offices scattered throughout the city, decided to consolidate as a way to increase efficiency. Even though there were more intake staff than ever in the one single location, the lines were getting longer. It seems like the intake process that worked okay before didn't work as well anymore. They also discovered that they didn't all do it the same way, that intake had been happening differently in the different offices that were now consolidated. They realized that the process perhaps needed to be examined and updated and optimized for their new situation. What I'm wondering is if you've experienced anything like this, maybe due to some change in your external environment, a change that you made to your organization, or whatever it is, have you come to a point where you think, wow, this process is not working any longer, or maybe it never did work? I'd love for you to share what process that might be. What's one process you have in mind that may be a need of improvement in your organization? I see somebody suggested paper handling, the process in need of improvement intake, similar to LAF, intake and case assignments, grant reporting is another one that was suggested. Great, thanks for giving me some insight into what kinds of processes you have in mind. Let's go on to just a few basics of what business process mapping actually is. You may be familiar with some of this, and maybe this is brand new to you. I'm going to try to keep it at a pretty basic level so that we can all at least get to a basic similar understanding of this. Mapping is just one step in process improvement. What you'll see here is a general chart of what process improvement steps might include. First, choosing the process you want to improve, and you've already been thinking about that just now. Then, getting input from stakeholders, which is the step right before actually mapping the process. That's what we're really going to focus on today, but it's really hard to separate that and do it effectively unless you've looked at the two steps that it touches, which are gathering stakeholder input, and then the next one after it, which is actually analyzing the process, finding areas to improve. Then, of course, at that point, you're not done. It doesn't really help for you just to name what the problem is. You also have to make changes and then see if they actually worked, and if they didn't, then make some further changes, reevaluate, and so forth. It's shown here as a cycle because often you'll make a few changes and then you'll iterate again and again until the process is truly optimized. You might have heard of Kaizen or Six Sigma. Those are terms that are often used in business press, popular press that have been mostly used in a manufacturing environment, and those are just different approaches to process improvement, essentially. Process improvement and mapping specifically doesn't just have application in that kind of environment though, like when you're making cars or widgets. It also can work with services. It can work in a nonprofit context and really benefit nonprofit organizations. Here are a few ways that can do this. When you see everything laid out visually, it's easier to spot the inefficiencies and maybe even find shortcuts from step one to step four, skipping a few steps. So visual formats can reveal some of that and help you increase efficiency. It's also a way to improve the quality of your service and the way people experience your services. Another thing that you may have read about or heard about is the concept of user-centered design. That's been kind of a hot topic in the past few years. User-centered design is about designing an experience or a product around the individual that is using it or benefiting from it. Taking that kind of approach to process improvement means that not only does each staff member involved in a process know what they have to do and why they have to do it, but they also are thinking about how the whole experience feels to a client and what role each step plays in that client's experience. So mapping a process can help you see more of the big picture from a client's perspective rather than just seeing your own little slice of it from your perspective as a person who is responsible for step five out of a bigger process. Another benefit of process mapping is that it can help you standardize processes, particularly in the case where you've got a lot of inconsistency and you want to get everybody on the same page. Like in the example of Laugh earlier, the consolidated offices found that the intake processes were all different. So mapping can standardize a process, but it also can identify or define the areas where people should use their judgment, where a process should have some variation. So it can indicate where people are empowered to make a decision instead of making it all identical every single time. And after this webinar, you'll choose a process to map and maybe it's one of the ones that you've already suggested that you have in mind, but just mapping is not going to be enough for you to really experience these benefits. You won't stop there. You'll need to talk about it, revise it and so on. And also remember that process improvement is not like a magical solution to your problem. It's actually pretty easy to do. But it's some work. It takes some effort and you may encounter some resistance from coworkers, from people that are involved in the process improvement that maybe they're resistant to change, maybe they feel like this is a waste of time. And so there's a little bit of effort that needs to go into just getting people to buy into this and understand the benefit of process improvement. Don't expect that everybody is just going to welcome it with open arms. All right, so let's just talk a little bit about how it works. Starting with stakeholder input. So there you'll talk about what's working and what isn't. A great question to start with is just what drives you nuts. And for stakeholder input, you might do that in the form of surveys, focus groups, interviews, or other ways of receiving input from individuals that are involved and maybe from a wider group as well. And you can ask them details about exactly what they do, but also where they think there could be improvement and that may give you clues to which processes you might start with. And then it's a matter of mapping it step by step. And easiest way to do this is sticky notes on a wall, especially in the early phases, even when you see, and you'll see an example of this later, very nice looking charts that have been built in a software program that builds a flow chart for you. Often those started out as post-it notes stuck onto a wall or a big piece of paper or something like that. Your first process that you map probably, hopefully, won't be as complex as the one that you see here in the picture. I would suggest starting with something that's a little simpler. The convention is that you go from left to right rather than top to bottom or right to left or some other direction. It usually goes from left to right and then sometimes loops around to a second or third row as well. You can use colors to indicate who is responsible. Or sometimes there's other uses of color coding, but most often it's used to indicate who's responsible for that step. And it might not just be a person. It might also be some kind of system. Like, for example, say you have a step in a process where a payment gateway service has to process a credit card and then send back confirmation. So you might use green to indicate, like, that's a step that's done by a system and not a person. So let's dig into this just a little bit more. I want to really help you understand how this might work by using an example. So this is an example that hopefully many of us can relate to and isn't tied to a particular type of organization. This is about making my son Timothy's lunch. He is seven years old. He goes to a summer program when school is out. And so this is something that we've been going through every day, usually in the evening. And so you can see there's basically just four steps here. Deciding what kind of sandwich he's going to make, assemble a sandwich, and then there's a decision point. Is it going to be a field trip day? If so, we pack it in a paper bag. If not, we pack it in the lunchbox and then place the lunch in the backpack. Sounds like a pretty simple process. You would think that this would take five minutes, but he is seven, and so it sometimes takes 45 minutes to an hour. And so we looked at this, and I have to be honest, I didn't actually map this out on paper. I kind of did it in my head, but I was thinking, like, what are the steps to this, and what is taking so long? Where are we getting stuck? And what we realized is that the first step, deciding what kind of sandwich or what he's going to pack in his lunch, was the place where that was actually a lot of steps, because it was standing in front of the refrigerator with the door open for 15 minutes, kind of looking at what we had there, and asking his brother what he was making for his lunch, and going to ask dad what he thinks we should make for lunch, and then deciding to make something for lunch that we don't actually have the right supplies for, and then going back to the start again, and, you know, it's kind of an endless loop there. So I'll kind of reveal the outcome to this. What we ended up doing is separating that part of the process from everything else, and consolidating on, like, we write down a menu for the whole week, we decide exactly what's going to go into the lunches every day, and now it just starts with consulting the menu, and that has made the process maybe five minutes, 10 minutes, instead of sometimes an hour that it used to take. So that's my little story about practical process improvement in my house. Now let's look at a real example from a legal aid organization, and this was, this came from a consulting group, say, for us, Lean, and we've used this with their permission, and last permission, LAP was the client, and this is their part of their escrow process, and so they have a number of processes that are broken down into sub-processes. This is one of the sub-processes. You can see the steps there. And I'm going to use my highlighter here. One thing that I think is interesting about this is that they've put in some document links here that show you, you know, documents that are used at different steps of the process. They've also used these little arches to indicate who is responsible for that process. So these are just black and white, not color-coded, but that's how they indicate who does it. There's a couple of decision points, like right here. There's, you know, did they receive the funds or not? And then you can see if they did not, it goes one direction. If they did, it actually skips that whole row and goes down to this next line here. And there's also a point where it indicates the start and the end of the process. So this is, I think, a great example of a process that you might experience in your own organization that's a little bit more complex. And they've accounted for all the different steps and variations here. I think I'm seeing, oh, sorry, Vivian is correcting me for saying laugh and they don't say it that way. They say LAF. So I apologize for that, for making up my own, my own acronym. So let's, let's go on to just a couple of tips for, oops, I need to get rid of my highlighting here, sorry. Go on to a couple of tips for how this all works. You want to answer who, what, how, and why. And so for who, it's like who does this step but also who else is present? Who else is involved in that step? And then what, what exactly do they do? What tools do they use? Where do they do it? How fast do they do it? What is the quality measure? That's all kind of part of how. And for why, what is the desired outcome of this process? What is the trigger for this process to begin? So those are all questions to think about when you're mapping this and you'll probably do it in a group, you know, get four or five people together, have everybody answer some of those questions, document all the steps with sticky notes, move them around if you need to, and then don't stop there but actually walk through it. So, you know, use your process map and follow its instructions to test whether you've actually documented it accurately. This is another example of a little bit fancier process map that's been created in, in software that's built for this purpose. And a couple of other software packages that I'm familiar with that work well for this and are free, or at least have a free level are Glyphie and Lucidcharch. And there are many, many others as well, but those are just two that I know some of my peers have recommended. I'll just type those in really quickly for you in the chat so you can see those two. So Glyphie and Lucidchart. And so this process map has swim lanes and that's something that we haven't seen in some of the other ones. So it's actually got different rows that separate out or group together all the responsibilities of a particular party. In this case the customer, sales system, dispatch team and career. And then the arrows indicate the order that steps are done in. And in some cases, like after the email confirmation to the customer, there are kind of two different things that happen where there's two different parties involved in that. So that's one way to kind of get fancy. And you also, it's not demonstrated in this one, but you can use different shapes for different kinds of steps. One convention that I've often seen is a diamond shape for a decision point. And I guess that's it. So certainly not necessary to convert to a digital flow chart. I've seen for simple process mapping and improvement processes that are kind of quick and dirty. I've seen people just stick post-it notes on a wall, snap a picture with their cell phone and then that's what they save. And that can work just fine. It does take some time to master software like this and so if you don't have anybody who already knows it, I would suggest pausing for a moment to consider whether it's worth the effort to make something that looks really beautiful like this when something that's just hand-drawn will actually do. And then just, you know, keep on going after that. Once you've got your process documented, then your next job is to find your quick wins and implement those right away, then move on to deeper analysis. And also don't forget, as we said earlier, to evaluate the changes and come back to a process later to further tweak it and improve it. Just a few tips to get started and then I'm going to hand off to to our panel discussion. So who should we involve? We hinted at this before. It is important to have a leader from your organization involved in this as a champion and somebody to put some some cloud behind it and some accountability to it. But also don't forget the people that the process is being done to. Clients, volunteers, also external partners, perhaps agencies you refer to and perhaps funders. There are a lot of different parties that could perhaps be touching this process and it's helpful to get input from many different perspectives. A good way to get people excited about process improvement is to start with what annoys people the most or start with something that is going to make their lives a little bit better. So that's a great way to choose where to begin and just a few mistakes to look out for or traps to avoid. Getting too granular is I think a classic novice mistake and so an example of that would be an appropriate level of detail might be mail the documents. An inappropriate level of detail might be get on an envelope, fold the document, insert it into the envelope, seal the envelope, attach the stamp. You know all all those things as separate steps really aren't necessary in most cases. Also our panelist Susan suggested the the point here about beware the naysayer. Ignoring people who are negative about the process or say this is not going to work can cause a lot of trouble and kind of kill any hope for lasting improvements so it can be important to acknowledge those people and let them have their say and see if they actually have anything valid to say that you might want to pay attention to. Another mistake is just not putting enough effort into making sure that there's accountability and there's strong leadership for this. Someone who actually has the authority to call people to action and hold them accountable for making the improvements. Otherwise it can be very easy to get distracted by the next emergency or the next project or kind of leave processes mapped but not really improved and of course that's the ultimate goal of this. So I hope you will go ahead and just give this a try like today or next week while this is fresh in your mind. Just tackle something simple that is annoying and fixable and get some experience with this right away. And so now I'm going to get back into our panel discussion and I want to go back to our intros. Here we go. So I'm going to let Vivian and Susan introduce themselves and there are two panelists today. We have a few questions in mind to ask them and I'd be glad to take any of your questions at this point as well. So while they're introducing themselves you might type in some questions that you have for them. And Vivian would you like to introduce yourself first? Sure. Thanks Karen. I'm Vivian Hessell at LAF in Chicago. We formerly were the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago but we changed her name a couple years ago so we just call ourselves LAF now. And I have been at LAF for a number of years first as a staff attorney and then a supervisory attorney for one of our intake offices and my most recent incarnation is I'm the Director of Technology for Advocates. I've been in this position for about six years and I work closely with the IP pros in our office and with all of our advocates to implement major technology projects. I'm also the on-site administrator for Legal Server, our case management system. So I have been involved in the mapping process that we've done with five different work groups so far here at LAF and it's been very interesting. Each time it's been a little bit different but there also have been some common themes that have come through each time. So I'm happy to talk about it with everybody today. Great. And Susan would you like to introduce yourself as well? Sure. I'm Susan Zelgi. I'm the managing attorney of the Eastern Regional Office of Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation. We cover 65 counties in Central and Southern Illinois so we're just a couple hours south of Vivian in the great state of Illinois who's thinking about having a budget one of these days. The work we do is very typical legal aid work. My office is covers the territory of 14 counties and we have four other regional offices and so a lot of what we do gets very non-standardized with five different offices doing things the way that they want to do them. We have a hotline where about half of our new client intake happens and that was one of the areas that we came to look at for business process improvement trying to think through how intake worked for our clients, how it worked internally for us, and we also then with the work with the help of Cypher's lean did analysis of a couple of our specific substantive areas housing and consumer. Those designs came out of a legal needs assessment that said our clients needed more help with housing and consumer work in a time when we were doing a lot of family law and so we wanted to see how we could get cases through intake quicker to the regional offices so that we could work more on housing and consumer issues for those clients and so when we did our mapping and our business process improvement we were looking at the hotline intake process and then we looked at standardizing case acceptance policies for all of our housing areas and all of our consumer areas working through trying to create some scripts for the intake workers so that we could get the necessary information to the regional office attorneys when they first got the case and then trying to also think through just some checklists and standardized forms and pleadings that we could use in some of those substantive areas. Okay thanks for the introduction and a little background from both of you on your experience with this and I'm wondering if you could say a little more about the process improvement work that you've done and how much time it took. I know that's that's probably a question on a lot of people's minds like wow this sounds like it could be a really big deal and I don't know if I have time for this so maybe you can talk a little bit about about that and how you decided how much time to invest in it. Sure we thought that we would take about a year to work on those three different areas intake through our hotline our housing work and our consumer work. We were actually able to complete it in about nine months time so it went a little faster than we expected. We started in February of 2014 and and when I say nine months I'm talking about kind of the whole process of starting with talking to the stakeholders the voice of the client interviews through the final implementation of the consumer changes that we wanted to make and so in February of 2014 our consultants Cy Farthleen started talking with all of the hotline attorneys all of the attorneys in the program who did housing all of the attorneys who did consumer the managing attorneys the executive director the deputy director and then some clients as well to get a sense of what the areas were that we wanted to address. That took a month or so to complete all of those interviews and then a couple more weeks to be able to document that all and sit down and talk with the executive director and deputy director about what those interviews resulted in and then we started the actual mapping process so for two days in April we met for the full day on the first day it was just the intake staff with the executive director and deputy director and they mapped out the intake process then on day two all of the housing attorneys came into the room and we're a little overwhelmed at the map of our intake process but we then spent that day mapping out how we handle cases when they first get to the office and then talking through case acceptance policies for all of the different types of housing cases that we handle. Out of that meeting we then spent some time with different people having different responsibilities but we spent then a couple months working on standardizing the case acceptance policies having that language and setting it so that the regional offices could only say yes we'll take those cases or no we won't instead of adding in 10 caveats about every type of case that came through so two months later we met again to evaluate how that was going or I'm sorry two months later we instituted the standardized case acceptance policies and then a month into that process we met again to evaluate the changes that we had made in the housing area how that had gone were there any concerns that we wanted to address and that had gone amazingly well in everybody's perspective and then we spent one day doing an evaluation of the work we had done so far and the second day we tackled consumer and then because it was July and people started taking vacations it took us a little longer to get the consumer standardized case acceptance policies in place so that ended up taking about three months to get those in use rather than the two months it took us to get housing in place but we got those done and implemented and then we've just been since then doing follow-up to make sure that housing and consumer are going well and then expanding it to everything else so by the beginning of 2016 we had standardized case acceptance policies for all of the areas of law that we handle and now we just have to keep evaluating making sure that things are being handled properly and then building on what we've done and trying to create more scripts and forms and things like that. Great thanks for sharing some of the detail of what your project plan was like and what the different steps were and Vivian I'm wondering if we could invite you to do the same and you know just briefly talk about what the major steps were of your process and how long it took for you. Sure the commons a denominator for all of our groups is we pretty much started the same way we started with a one day meeting a beginning a launch meeting and invited everybody to participate and I think that the most successful meetings were the ones where we really got folks to open up and talk about what truly bothered them or annoyed them in those meetings and sometimes it happened earlier on with some groups and sometimes it happened later in the day but we managed to get to that point and I think that that's important because that's where you really get to the question about what drives you nuts which is something that you mentioned earlier today Karyn and that's an important question to always ask. After we had those initial meetings we ended up breaking our groups up into subcommittees to address the processes that we decided to tackle and invariably the group would come up with more processes or issues that they wanted to address than we had time to address so we had to prioritize them but we were able to do that at the initial meeting the launch meeting and so we would decide what to address and then divide the group up to address those issues sometimes we had quick wins that we could pretty much assigned to one or two people usually people in leadership roles who could address them quickly but other times the processes were more involved and that's when the committee or the subcommittee was important. The committee would do its work, would get feedback from stakeholders, would map out the process, would analyze the process, make sure that they had covered all of the steps and then report back to the group and that was basically the way that we went through this with each of our work groups here at LAF. We've done it with five different groups so far and the first time I think was in 2013 or 2014 so we've had basically overlapping or one project following another since then right now we're working with our public benefits practice group to go through the business process analysis so we're continuing to do this with all of our work groups and we've been fortunate enough to have SAFEARTH work with us each time. I would say that Susan's estimate about how long it takes to do this with each group is right between six to 12 months total is about right but you can also do it in a much shorter time if you have a small process that you want to address or try to tweak and fix. The key is to make sure that you get the input, that you map it out and then you go back and analyze it again once you've done that. So that's basically the way that we went about it and are going about it still here at LAF. So just to go to the extreme on that let's say you only have an hour in a staff meeting to tackle process improvement. Is there anything that realistically could be accomplished in that short of a time frame? I think so. It depends on how open people are to really having an honest discussion and whether you have people in the room who have the ability to make the changes that might need to be made or can tap into the folks at the organization who can make the decisions about making those changes. Vivian mentioned a little bit about a favorite question to ask in the process about like what is it that drives you nuts? Or I'm not sure exactly how you phrase that but I'm wondering if either of you could share other questions that you might ask in the voice of the client input or during the mapping process itself. Sure Karen. There are a lot of different things but I think most of the time when we're thinking about improving a process we want to get at people's pain points. We want to know what does bother them and what they want to see fixed. But you may not want to always make it sound so negative. So sometimes it's just as simple as asking is there something that you think you're always reinventing the wheel about and that can maybe get you to creating some standardized forms that you don't have to recreate every time or something as open-ended as what would make your life easier to get at some of the bigger picture issues in a more positive way? I agree I think those are the kinds of questions to ask and and also it seems helpful to sometimes go through the mapping process with different groups or parts of it with different groups to get people to explain what they're doing and maybe why they're doing it that way. Sometimes when you're in a group and you're mapping something that will naturally happen as part of the discussion when people identify the steps someone else will say well why are you walking from the ninth floor up to the tenth floor to put something in the bin to be mailed or vice versa and so that will help people identify what can be done to fix the process. I think just asking why about 20 times is a great way to get to the bottom of things and find places where you can maybe find a quick win and and I'm wondering if each of you could talk a little bit about that as well you know we're there specific examples of quick wins that you found after mapping a process. We had a couple of quick wins at LAF we had in our housing practice group when we went through the mapping process and this was one of the very first groups to do this we learned that in our interview room there were forms and documents that the staff were using all the time and there wasn't a system for replenishing those when they ran out and so it was frustrating to people to go into an interview with a client and realize they didn't have the form that they know they always need the retainer or the release or the self-addressed stamped envelopes to give the client for their purposes for the purpose of sending in their escrow payments for their rent and so we devised a system that was pretty basic but it was just a matter of of getting it done and making sure that it it stayed in place and it just allows us to keep track of the the form so when the last form is is the last form in the folder the person gets a notice or sees a little note that says don't use this make copies first and it was just a matter of making sure that that note was there in each one of the folders that they use so that was one quick win and it was our administrative staff who obviously helped us get that done. Another quick win is that we discovered that our staff were frustrated by the touchscreens on our multifunction machines because it's hard to type in an address and to an email and what they wanted to be able to do is scan hard copies of documents after they've been signed by a client to the case profile in our case management system and they needed to be able to type the case ID number of the case profile in order to send it to the profile so we talked to our IP pros and found some small keypads that we could purchase an address and attach rather to the multifunction machines with raised keys on them and it just made it much easier for people to type the numbers that they needed to type to send the email and we also programmed the machines to self populate auto populate the rest of the email address automatically so it just made it easier and faster for everybody and it was a small thing to do that made life better. Our hotline had two quick wins right off the bat after the very first meeting. The managing attorney of the hotline had a signature stamp that she hardly ever used and would go through and sign every letter that went out to the prospective clients at the end of the day so these are clients who are either getting referred to the regional offices or we're just getting advice and a brochure and she would go through and look at every letter and sign it well she realized she didn't need to do that they were standard letters the language wasn't changing at all and so she pulled her signature stamp back out and handed it to her secretary and said it's yours take care of the letters every day. So that freed up a huge amount of time for her to actually spend in quality control review of the cases or handling more intakes herself. The other quick win that they got right off the bat was that they had previously been printing every single intake that they did every day and she was reviewing the paper intakes and then they were filing them away in file cabinets and most of these cases were advice only cases and all of the information was in our case management system so they actually quit printing the intakes they quit filing them away they then cleaned out the ones that they had already and removed the file cabinets which cleared up space to be able to have more workstations for hotline attorneys. Those are all fantastic examples and I especially love to hear about improvements that result in less paper and less filing space and things like that but also just you know removing steps and freeing up people especially a leader who has skills that go beyond just you know reviewing a standard document and signing it to really do something that that moves the organization forward and and provide better service to clients so those are great great examples. I want to circle back to something we talked about a few minutes ago about questions to ask during the process and one of our audience members has asked when we talk about what's annoying are you looking on this based on their experience as staff or what they think is our clients actually I might be missing the end of that question so what what would you respond to that? Karen I saw that question I think it's very intriguing and I think it depends on what you are trying to improve so for us when we were looking at the intake process we did some interviews with actual clients and we get evaluation forms back from clients who have gone through the hotline and we use that information to help us think through even before we had done this some improvements to the intake process. One of the changes that we had made was to get a phone system where we could actually allow someone to save their spot in the queue but hang up their phone and then when it was their turn in the queue the system would call them back so that they could go about their day for a bit and not just sit there and hold wasting their minutes and would actually still save their spot in the line. So when you're thinking about something as client intensive as the initial intake experience I think you have to find out what's annoying to the clients but you also have to talk about the staff who are doing the intake they have a sense too of what is going to be annoying to the clients and what is annoying to them what feels like a waste of their time things that they see that could be streamlined so that they could help more people. Great, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the tougher points during process mapping like what were some of the tougher processes that you had to tackle what was difficult about trying to map them you know was it because they had a lot of different variations or decision points or was it because of a lot of people involved or a lot of steps maybe talk a little bit about your your most difficult one to get mapped. Well one of the most difficult processes that we've had to tackle at LAF is creating a standardized knowledge management system and I'm not talking about the tech part of it I'm talking about it from the standpoint of populating the information and this came up in our business process mapping for all of our work groups because in each instance each group could say we have experts who know a lot and we don't have an efficient way of getting that information out of their heads and into the hands and the heads of everybody else who needs it and we need to figure out a way to do that and I think that when you have a tough process like this that you're trying to tackle you need to try to step back and break it down into smaller parts because it's not going to be possible to take on something that's too big it's just not going to work so one of the things that we were able to do is in our groups decide well what is the information what is a part of a piece of the information that we can take on and devise a way of organizing for this group and so for example in our consumer practice group we decided that we could create a timeline for bankruptcy cases and then decision guides for our staff and templates of different legal documents to use for our staff at each point in the timeline of a typical bankruptcy case and that was one way that we could share the knowledge that some of our more experienced litigators had and make it available to everybody else but when you have a tough process like that it really helps to take a few steps back and and break it down into bite-sized chunks and then just go from there I mean it's it's going to be something that we'll be working on for a long time to come but it's important to do Susan, anything to add to that? I think for us it wasn't necessarily a process that was tough to tackle it was coming to those final decisions about what changes to make and the example that immediately comes to mind is when we were standardizing our case acceptance policies for evictions for just private landlord tenant evictions we had five different regional offices deciding in five different ways which cases they wanted to talk to and one of our offices said if somebody's been served with court papers we should be talking to them in the regional offices we just should everybody and at that point the other offices thought that the flood gates were going to be opened and they were going to be inundated with cases and would never be able to get out from underneath it but our consultant just said you know you can make this choice and then wait a couple weeks and see if you're still alive and if you are great and if you're not then you can come back and revisit it none of these decisions are set in stone and so I think one of the things to remember is that this is all about change and improvement and you're going to make some decisions that maybe aren't going to get you where you want to be but you can go back and change that decision and evaluate whether or not it works and I will say that in deciding that all of these landlord tenant court cases were coming through we are now two years later and everybody's office still is accepting those all the time nobody has been inundated with too many of them and we are getting much better results for our clients because they have an attorney who's able to negotiate with the other side I think that's such an important point that some of my my background has been in innovation and specifically how technology and innovation work in a nonprofit context and one of the hallmarks of an innovative organization is a spirit of experimentation and being open to failure and and just like piloting things before making a long-term commitment to them and I think you've kind of expressed that like let's having this attitude like let's try this for two weeks and see if it works or not and if it doesn't we'll go back and do it differently so that's that's a great example any other examples of maybe things that you tried that didn't work or experiments that worked better than you expected I will say that for land of Lincoln the purpose in looking at our housing and consumer areas was to increase the number of cases where we could provide extended representation and so when we set out what we wanted to measure we were just looking at sheer numbers of cases and pretty much every evaluation point that we've looked at since we implemented the changes has shown a pretty flat or slightly increased number of extended representation cases but we didn't see the jump that we wanted to see and part of that was not understanding how best to measure what we were doing we were looking at just kind of sheer flat numbers rather than looking at staffing and connection to it and legal aid staffing changes on a pretty regular basis when we started we had some funding to do more foreclosure work than we have funding to do now and so that clearly was going to make an impact on how many people were doing housing cases in general but then we had to go back and just start working through the process now of if we if standardizing the case acceptance policies didn't increase those cases why not are there areas where some of the local attorneys still don't have enough expertise or tools to take on the cases and so they get them and they're still giving them just advice and not jumping into the litigation is there training that we can provide are there more standardized processes and forms that some of the more experienced attorneys could share like Vivian talked about earlier that we could share with some of the less experienced attorneys so that they feel like they can get into those litigation cases yeah I agree and and I would just also add and build on what Karen talked about in terms of being innovative and experimenting and being willing to fail I think for a lot of lawyers they tend to be perfectionists a little bit and they're a little reluctant to have something that doesn't work but the IP pros are a little bit more adept at trying something to see if it works or to see if it is going to be helpful and not being as reluctant to say that it doesn't work and we want to try something else one example that I thought of in terms of something that we tried that didn't quite work the way we wanted it to is that in one of our groups we decided to come up with standardized questions to ask all of the clients for the cases that they had and we built those questions in our case management system and legal server but when it came down to actually using them the staff didn't like the fact that the questions were presented in a certain order and not as flexible as just taking notes on a page because that was the way they were used to working and it was more sort of a free form type of way of keeping information so what we ended up doing is taking out the formatted questions and just coming up with a script or basically a checklist of questions that people can use and refer to so that they can help themselves remember what information to gather from the client but then they just use the notes field to keep track of the information they get and they can type it in any way they want I think that's a great example of being responsive to people's needs too so you know and that's that's not just about making a process more efficient which is what most people hope to get out of process improvement at the start but it's actually helping the process to be better quality and more enjoyable for the people who are doing it and empowering them to to do what they do best so that's great okay a question from the audience and I'm not sure who this is directed to I I think maybe Susan but it says can you go a little bit more into how the mapping of the intake intake process went for you so I will I will start by saying that I actually was not present the day they mapped it I just got to come in the day after when it was all over the walls and very intimidating and was that was that intentional so I don't think it was intentional and I will tell you it might like for your naysayers it might be a bad idea because I walked into the second day meeting with the with the probably the program's biggest naysayer about this whole process and when he saw everything up on the wall he wanted to turn around and drive back home he didn't like posters he didn't like maps and he was my ride and it was a three-hour drive so I was really hoping he would stick it out and he did and engaging him really made a huge difference because he having been a very experienced attorney in both housing and consumer could point out where problems existed and had the kind of the gravitas to be able to say it and people to listen to him and so yeah I was I don't know that it was a great thing to have on the wall when you first walk in and you see you know you think you have to do this for housing as well but I did just email to Brian so hopefully he can share it with everybody afterwards just the pictures of our intake process map before we made changes and then the final version and so you can all get a chance to look at that it's really when you think about each decision point that has to be made in an intake for particularly an LSC program it's it's a process and so those maps are four pages long walking through all of the decision-making process and all of our hotline staff were involved and so when you're mapping out those things often you think it's a five-step process and you put the five steps up there and then somebody says oh but you forgot this and then somebody else says well if you do that then you have to do this and that's why post-its work really well because you can rearrange things when they aren't in order or there's not space to put something else in and so having everybody that's involved in the process means that you get a fuller picture of how that process works and it took them I think half a day just to map out all of the processes and we're talking about you know the process for people who are going to be eligible the people who are not going to be eligible what do you do with them the people who are just going to get advice or brief service from the hotline the people who are going to be referred to the regional offices so there's different paths to take as well sorry I was on mute for a second I think we have time for just a couple more questions and one that I wanted to ask is what's an example of an unreasonable goal to have for process improvements or to put it another way what can you not expect process improvements to solve so a quick note here four of those process maps from Susan are up on the handouts now I just added those there are two more that will make available with the blog post after the video is done and let me just clarify so what it looks like Brian's been able to put up so far are actually the case acceptance policies because somebody else earlier in the chat asked to see if I could share those and so that's what those are and we are limited unfortunately to five attachments here but we will get all of these items up to the blog post afterwards right all right well so Vivian and Susan do you have any thoughts on like what what can this not solve well I guess one thing it can't solve is is getting everybody to use a new tool right away because there's going to need to be buy-in getting everyone to to use the a new process is going to require buy-in as well so whatever it is that you're trying to improve upon I think that remembering to embrace the naysayer is always going to be important because they're the ones who are going to be the most resistant to change typically and this is by definition going to involve change and so I think that one of the things that you can do to improve that or keep people on board with everything that you're doing is to stay upbeat and just let everybody know that we're going to give it a try and if it doesn't work we were we're going to try something else that you're not going to be obligated to continue using something or doing something in a different way just because we've decided to make a change the whole idea is to figure out how to make things better and so when people understand that and really believe that that's what you're trying to do you'll you'll probably get a lot of people to go along with you and when you get those folks who are enthusiastic about it they will by definition start bringing along other people as well mm-hmm yeah I think it's unrealistic to expect that this is going to change people's attitudes but when done well it does give you an opportunity to influence that while you're also working on improving the processes right right and one of the things that we have been talking about in this last year is we've also been working on developing SharePoint is a lot of this change management that you have to go through and one of the things that the other the other co-manager and I keep saying to ourselves is that we need to under promise and over deliver and so when you're even mapping out processes you have to be careful about what you're saying the end result is going to be because you can't make everything perfect and so trying to set more realistic expectations from the outset like Vivian talked about we're trying to make things better not perfect and then when it turns out that you struck a gold mine and it is pretty darn good then everybody's pleasantly surprised yeah I I love when the outcome is that like all of a sudden all our staff are performing so much better and you know it's not that it really improves their knowledge or their skill but it just made them easily made it easier for them to do their jobs effectively so that's always a fantastic outcome when that can happen great I think maybe we have time for about one more question I'm just going to scan real quickly to see what we have from the audience you know maybe I'll just give each of you a chance to share some closing remarks and and maybe ending with one thing that you would like people to take away you know if you can just close with with like one sentence if there's one thing you want people to know about business process mapping or take away from this webinar what would that be well I know what I'm going to say then go for it embrace the criticisms uh-huh so um you want to know more about that sure yeah embrace the criticisms when people start saying what they don't like when they when the naysayer really gets going let them go let them go on and on and on then have their peace because chances are there's other folks in the rumor who are having the same thoughts and it might be a little bit uncomfortable but if you get to that point then you're really getting to the pain point you're getting to the true issues that are really bothering people and the whole idea is to make the make it easier for them to do their jobs make them more efficient and so I would say embrace the criticisms and don't be afraid to hear them out yeah and some people see that as a sign that you're getting stuck but actually I think you're right that that's a sign of progress that if people have gotten to the point where they're still comfortable expressing that and you have a chance to really uncover maybe gripes or issues that have been previously hidden from you exactly and Susan I would wholeheartedly agree with that that was a big piece of us making any kind of headway in getting the maps even made and then thinking through how to make the changes that we wanted to see happen the other piece of advice that I would give everybody is that legal aid like most things in life likes to do things the way that they've always done things and so my piece of advice is don't get stuck in the mud of we've always done it that way change is hard but when you want to make improvements sometimes change is the only way to get that done and being willing to honestly evaluate the way that you've always done things is key and sometimes you're going to make that evaluation and the way you've always done it is the way to keep doing it but sometimes it's not and so you've got to be willing to pull your feet out out of that mud and move forward yeah that's a great point as well and in my personal experience I've found that's especially dangerous when the way you've always done it has been getting great results and in fact up until this exact moment in time it has still been getting great results but you can see something down the road that's going to be different where it might stop working and you know to be able to head that off and change your process before it starts to decline is really difficult and that's that's a leadership challenge but if you can do that successfully then you're serving your clients much better great well I think we're about ready to wrap up so I want to thank both of you for your fantastic remarks here and giving a lot of examples that people can really sink their teeth into that are closely relevant to their own organizations it's been a pleasure and with that I think I'll just hand it back to you for a moment Brian if you want to make any closing remarks yes thank you so much for putting this on as I mentioned this is a new topic for us you'll be asked to do a short survey afterwards any feedback if this is something you found useful or if it's something you want to go more in depth to please let me know the next two trainings that we have coming up are voice over IP unified communication systems with William Guyton and with James Logan and then recent outcome evaluations for legal aid technology projects those can both be found on the lsmtap.org website there's links on the home page also a great place to discuss this kind of stuff is the lsmtap email list there is a link to it also on our home page it is now posted over at Google groups if you do not have a Google Gmail associated with any of your email addresses you can also email Brian R at nwjustice.org and I can directly add members so you can receive email without having a Google account the email list is extremely active a great place to ask questions about topics like this I'll drop my email address in there in just a second thank you all so much I greatly appreciate the presentation today I learned a lot