Creating a Brown Paper a Practical Guideline

Creating a Brown Paper a Practical Guideline and Presentation Slide Show

This post includes a presentation on how a Brown Paper workshop can be run – it explains what a Brown Paper is and how to ‘create’ one in a workshop setting.

General Guidelines for a Brown Paper Exercise

  • In identifying which processes to ‘brown-paper’ consider what information you would like to get from the exercise as well as clearly defining the beginning and ending points of the process – the scope of the activity is important.
  • Start at a suitable level – usually departmental to start with. Gain experience before mapping going to larger scale.
  • Select those people who know the most about the process – the process-owners or the people who do the work day-to-day. These people are the true experts in how the job is done and through the thousands of everyday interactions and activities they do have a deep knowledge of what works and where the problems are.
  • Also include those people who are key interface points into and out of the process the ‘customers’ of what the process delivers or suppliers of what the process consumes.
  • The accuracy of the BP must be verified, both by the owners of the process and those impacted by the process.
  • Bringing in more people from the organization also increases awareness of the BP activities, builds buy-in, and begins to develop better interdepartmental knowledge and teamwork.
  • Evaluating the BP begins by looking at the process flow as a whole & studying individual components. Asking what this process component achieves and whether it adds value to the sum total.
  • At this point we can now make judgments and suggest ideas on the strengths and opportunities inherent the process. What is this BP telling us about how we carry out this task?

The BP also serves as a presentation tool to convey findings, strengths, opportunities, and ideas for process improvements. It is a wonderful tool to explain what is going on in an organisation and even better when explained by those whose day-to-day job is to carry out the process.

Tool Kit Brown Paper

Download a PDF of this post here: Toolkit-RACICharting