Future-State Process Sketch

Sketch the process as it should work, show which waste each change removes, name what you give up, and plan how people will start using it. You finish with a design the people who run it have shaped, and a pilot to test it.

Evidence: lean process design has a large but mixed applied literature, with results depending on context and execution. Process mapping is a practitioner tool. The RACI matrix is practitioner convention with no canonical original. The adoption plan draws on the change readiness and reactions research (strong evidence for the reactions research; its typologies are contested). Targets on this page are your own, not research thresholds.

Use it when:

• You have found the causes and waste (in 8.7 Root Cause & Waste Notes) and now need to design the fix.
• You are launching a new process and want it on one page before building anything.
• A change is coming and the people who run the work have not yet seen the design.

Skip it when:

• You do not yet know how the work flows today: use 8.1 Process Map (Current State).
• You only need to plan a handful of tasks: use 8.9 Action Plan & Kanban.

Future-state design makes two claims. The lean claim: a better process mostly has less in it, with fewer handoffs, queues and rework, because waste lives in the flow between activities (Ohno, 1988; Womack & Jones, 1996). The applied literature is large but mixed. The change claim: a design becomes a process only when people adopt it, and adoption responds to sequence and involvement, not announcement. Sequencing models such as Kotter's steps (Kotter, 1995) are practitioner frameworks with limited direct testing, so the adoption stages here lean on readiness and reactions research instead.

Treat both halves as equals. Each waste you found should visibly disappear from a step, or you have drawn the current process with nicer tools. Name the trade-offs: a design that improves everything has usually examined nothing. And do not skip adoption: it is the most common way a good design becomes a poster.

Say what success looks like in numbers you can measure today. If you have no baseline, measure first.

Strong answer: (illustrative numbers) "Order change reaches the planner within 1 hour (now: 2 days); parts errors under 1 in 30 (now: 1 in 6)." Not: "Faster and fewer errors."

Process and process owner (role):

Design principles (two or three, for example: minimize handoffs, one source of truth, quality checked where the work happens):

Illustrative example: the company and the numbers are made up.

A kitchen joinery near Gothenburg has found (see 8.7) that order changes after quoting do not reach the planner. The operations manager drafts the future flow with the planner, the foreman and a fitter.

Step 2: trigger "customer changes an order". Step 1, sales logs the change in the shared order sheet (owner: sales, 5 minutes). Step 2, planner updates the parts list (owner: planner, 30 minutes). Step 3, foreman checks it against the drawing (owner: foreman, 15 minutes). Step 4, parts are cut. End state: one parts list that matches the drawing.

Step 3: the change "one shared sheet instead of email" removes waiting and rework; the price is five minutes of extra logging by sales.

Step 5: pilot with one team for four weeks. The fitter suggests a color tag for changed orders, which goes into the design before rollout. Review date set for week five.