The purpose of the cross-functional flow diagram

- I was once a baseball coach with little kids. At the start of every season, we'd go through the rules of the game. Stand here at home plate, hit the ball, and run. Invariably, first-timers would run the wrong way towards third base. Some would take off across the diamond to second. But pretty quickly after they heard all the other kids screaming and laughing, they realized that there's an order to baseball and a sequence to running around the bases if they wanted to hit a home run. The same idea is useful when it comes to the cross-functional flow diagram in getting the sequence of events right. The purpose of the cross-functional flow diagram is to capture and order the activities that are performed by the various stakeholders from the initial process commencement trigger to completion. It tells the story from start to end. It illustrates a flow of events, in particular, how the crossover between the different functional areas, hence its name, cross-functional flow diagram. Even at the cross-functional flow level, comparative analysis can begin. A current state, or as is, cross-functional flow diagram is extremely useful in identifying and breaking down the existing complex business processes and identifying unnecessary routing of work between the functional areas. Analyzing these processes and the time it takes to move from one process to the next can help identify inefficiencies and where processes can be streamlined and improved. The beauty of this level of documentation is that you can see how the functional areas interact without having to drill down into lengthy, detailed, step-by-step workflows. Where the number of steps begins to look overwhelming on your diagram, you can choose to group these together in what we call predefined or subprocesses. You will notice in this example of a cross-functional flow diagram that there are two subprocesses, a create order process, which is done by the sales department, and a fulfill order process done by the fulfillment team. The purpose of the cross-functional flow diagram is that you don't have to document all of the noise slowing the process down by trying to ensure that every step is documented and validated. At this level, you just need to show that sales creates the order and that the fulfillment team processes the order. The swim lanes clearly delineate where one task ends and the next begins. In other words, you can understand simply by looking at this diagram that when sales has completed creating the order, there is a trigger received by operations to fulfill the order. All of the actual steps involved in the creation and fulfillment processes will be expanded in separate documents. Completing cross-functional flow diagrams helps everyone understand who needs to perform what and in what sequence, making clarification and understanding far easier to get around your bases and scoring that home run.