Document the work as it happens

Written procedures and how work is actually done drift apart over time. A purchase-approval routine may officially pass through a manager, while in practice a long-serving administrator approves routine orders and escalates only unusual ones. Automating the official version would remove a judgement call nobody wrote down. The aim of discovery is therefore descriptive: record current practice, including workarounds, before deciding what should change.

In a small firm the people who know the process are also busy running it. A short, well-prepared discovery that respects their time usually produces a better record than a long one that relies on goodwill.

SIPOC is a one-page outline used in Six Sigma, typically in the Define phase of the DMAIC cycle. It sets the boundary of a process before anyone draws detail. Using a generic supplier-invoice routine as an illustration:

Suppliers

Who provides the inputs: vendors sending invoices, the purchasing lead who raised the order.

Inputs

What arrives: invoice files by email or post, purchase order numbers, delivery notes.

Process

Five to seven high-level steps, from receipt to payment run, written as verbs.

Outputs

What leaves: an approved invoice posted in the accounts package, a payment, a filed record.

Customers

Who relies on the outputs: the supplier, the finance lead, the external accountant.

A completed SIPOC is the first artefact worth filing. If owner and consultant disagree about it, they disagree about the boundary of the work, and it is better to find out now.

Business Process Model and Notation, maintained by the Object Management Group and also published as the international standard ISO/IEC 19510, gives a shared visual vocabulary: events start and end a flow, tasks are rounded rectangles, gateways show decisions, and swimlanes show which role holds each step. Its value for an SME is not formality but readability; a diagram drawn in BPMN can be handed to a different consultant or a new employee without a translation session.

Common drawing tools include diagrams.net (formerly draw.io), Camunda Modeler and Microsoft Visio. The choice matters less than agreeing on one, storing the source file where the business can open it, and keeping diagrams at a level of detail a non-specialist can follow.

Lean practice, which grew out of the Toyota Production System, encourages going to the place where work happens, often called a gemba walk. In an office that may mean sitting beside someone as they process a morning's emails or sharing a screen during a month-end close. Observation surfaces the copy-and-paste steps, the second spreadsheet and the sticky note on the monitor. A discovery session can follow a simple sequence:

1. Agree the SIPOC boundary with the process owner.
2. Observe the process run on a normal day, noting each system touched.
3. Interview the people involved, asking what goes wrong and how they handle it.
4. Draft the BPMN map and walk it back through with the same people.
5. Record which steps handle personal data, for the firm's records of processing under UK GDPR.
6. File the map, notes and exception log in a shared, owned location.

Automations tend to fail on the cases discovery missed. An exception log lists each irregular situation, how often it arises in words (daily, monthly, rarely), how staff currently deal with it and whether the future automation should handle it, route it to a person or stop. Credit notes, duplicate invoices, missing order numbers and supplier name changes are typical entries in a finance routine. The log later feeds directly into acceptance tests.