The way the Process exploration is driven is almost always not a linear path. In fact there’s no methodology or way of work which is purely straight forward. It’s always needed – in the real world – to manage iterations, loops and validation to make an initiative successful. By following the methodology described roughly above (but will be explained in details later) we try to minimize the number of iterations between the business and the people in charge of the Process Improvement. We’d like to distinguish two terms: iterations and interactions beforehand.

An interaction is when you have a discussion between the business and the people in charge of the Process Improvement. It can happen at any time during the project and can be informal (a quick phone call, a 5 minute chat). At the opposite, a business workshop is a project activity more formal as it can need to be assessed and validated at the end. They can be considered as a concrete activity in the Process Improvement project plan (they can produce new project milestones).

To ensure these iterations will be successful it’s strongly important to leverage the Qualification phase (Stage 1 to 3). During this qualification we may see a lot of interactions of course but always, we’ll try to keep the iterations for the next stages (except for the stages 1, 2 and 3 validations) By the way, the iterations will really happen from stage 4.