Business process discovery

Discovery has one goal: write down how the business actually works, including the parts that live in one person's head.

The gap between the documented process and the real one is where implementations die. The documented process says purchase orders are approved by the department head. The real process is that the department head approves anything under ₹50,000 without looking, the finance manager quietly blocks anything from one particular supplier, and urgent orders go out on WhatsApp and get a PO raised afterwards.

All three of those are decisions the system has to accommodate or deliberately break. You cannot make that choice if nobody told you.

How to run it

Interview the people doing the work, not only the people managing it. The person who raises forty purchase orders a week knows things about your procurement process that no policy document contains.

Follow documents, not departments. Pick a real order and trace it end to end — who touched it, what they changed, what they had to check elsewhere, where it waited. Departmental interviews produce departmental answers; a document's journey crosses every boundary and exposes the handoffs.

Ask what people work around. Every workaround is a requirement in disguise. A shared spreadsheet that tracks "actual" delivery dates alongside the system's dates is telling you the system's dates are not trusted, and why.

Ask what would break if it stopped. This separates the process that matters from the process that is habit.

What to write down

For each process: the trigger, the steps, who does each one, what information they need, what they decide, what they produce, and — most importantly — what happens when it goes wrong. Exception handling is where most of the real complexity lives and where documentation is thinnest.

The output

A process map that the people who do the work will recognise. If you show it to them and they say "well, that's not really how it goes", you are not finished. That sentence, heard early, is the cheapest thing that will happen on the whole project.