Process Discovery & Mapping
Build a current-state process map from the people who execute the work.
Latent Variables interviews the roles involved in a process in parallel and reconstructs how work moves across teams, including handoffs, decisions, dependencies, local variations, exceptions, and workarounds. Leadership receives the current-state map and the materials needed to redesign, standardize, or automate the process.
The process discovery at a glance
The current-state map arrives within 6 days of fieldwork start.
15 minutes per person.
Every role in the process is interviewed concurrently. A coordinated population completes fieldwork in 48 hours.
About 2 hours in total: the process in scope, the roles involved, and the objective for the redesign.
Up to 2,000 participants in a single wave.
Each conversation adapts to the participant's position in the process and follows the specifics they raise: the exceptions they handle, the systems they touch, the steps they perform that no procedure records.
What the process discovery identifies
The same instrument interviews every role against shared campaign context, so different accounts of the same work are compared rather than averaged. A handoff described as complete by the sending team is examined with the team that receives it, during the same fieldwork.
Actual process sequence
The steps people take to move work from beginning to end.
Handoffs
Where work changes teams, systems, roles, or owners.
Decision points
Where formal or informal judgment changes what happens next.
Ownership
Who is responsible in practice, and where responsibility is unclear or shared.
Dependencies
What each step requires from another person, team, system, approval, or source of expertise.
Local variations
Where the same process operates differently across sites, teams, functions, or customer situations.
Exceptions
The cases where the standard process does not apply.
Workarounds
The informal steps people use when the designed process does not handle the work.
Tacit rules
The knowledge people use to make the process work that no procedure documents.
Reasons behind variation
Whether a difference is necessary, accidental, historical, system-driven, or produced by a capability gap.
How the map becomes redesign material
Where the evidence supports it, the discovery converts into materials the redesign can use directly:
The discovery stands on its own. If the process is later redesigned, standardized, or automated, a repeat read returns to the same roles with the original map preserved and shows whether the new process operates as designed, on the same 6-day turnaround.
What makes the process discovery different
Finds the work systems cannot see
Latent Variables uncovers manual steps, undocumented decisions, local exceptions, off-system work, informal dependencies, and the reasons a process varies across teams.
Goes deep across the organization
Adaptive, one-to-one conversations run in parallel across roles, locations, and levels. This provides the depth of an interview without limiting discovery to a small group of subject-matter experts.
Keeps process knowledge current
Follow-up conversations preserve context and show how work changes over time. Instead of producing a process map that becomes outdated, Latent Variables creates a living record of how the organization actually works.
Bring us one process.
We’ll describe how the discovery would be scoped, which roles it would cover, and what the map would give your redesign.
Map a process
Bring one transformation decision in planning or execution.
Pick a time on the rightbelow to learn more about our research and explore whether it may be relevant to your organization.
30 min
Web conferencing details provided upon confirmation.