A practical approach to better business

Driving immediate and tangible benefits with ‘Happy Path’ analysis

Vital Signs Analysis

What is vital for the Customer? For the Business?

Identifying Causes of Poor health

Frequently occurring impediments to good health

Generating actionable insights

A time to bring it all together

Building an implementation plan

Specific actions with owners and dates

Summary

You as the process owner have developed a roadmap to get to process happiness

DEFINING A HAPPY PATH

The Happy Path of Hand-offs is a picture of the process where each step is laid out sequentially. A step is defined as a set of all the activities that can be done without a hand-off from one person or team, to another person or team. So the transition from one step to another is a hand-off. Detailed work instructions between two hand-offs need not be modeled as separate steps. That level of granularity is not required in this method.

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Something to keep in mind: We only document what happens when everything goes right. This means the steps on the happy path should NOT include all the exceptions and complications that can happen from time to time. There will be a time to model that later – for now let’s focus on the best-case scenario.

Let us say we are facing timeliness issues in our Order Fulfillment business. We would know enough of the high level of the process and the potential Happy Path could be drawn as follows.