The first thing you need to do is define what your process is – and just as importantly: what it is not. To do that, you can ask yourself these questions:

1. The purpose of this process is to…?
2. You define the boundaries of your process by asking questions such as:
   1. Which process is it (not)?
   2. What are the most important tasks (not)?
   3. When are these tasks performed (not)?
   4. Why does this process (not) take place?
   5. Who is (not) involved?

Don't cheat yourself to answer the negative questions too. They help to make the process so much clearer for you when you have to start the mapping itself.

Before we get started, however, we need to get a handle on the most common symbols used for business process mapping:

This symbol indicates the start or end of a process. What "triggers" the process or what ends it.

The task to be performed. Written with a verb and a verb. For example: Fill + cup.

A connector. The arrow indicates a connection between two tasks. Never more than one arrow per connector.

The diamond indicates that a decision must be made. Can either be displayed with yes/no or true/false. Two arrows indicate the two options.

How to make a cup of coffee

A commonly used example to show a simple mapped process is coffee brewing. The coffee brewing process might look like this:

The process can of course be made much more complicated, you can add elements such as buying in, grinding the coffee, pouring it into the cup etc. But the idea is to keep the card as simple as possible and therefore only include the central elements in the process.

Also called in Danish business process description.