Question 2
Map by boundary, not by org chart
Most HR process mapping fails at the same place: it maps the HR directorate. The RFI is explicit that these workflows do not sit inside HR alone, and that is the correct framing. Our method treats every point where work leaves one directorate and enters another as the unit of analysis, because that is where cycle time, rework and lost visibility actually accumulate.
Process census and boundary register
Before any mapping, we enumerate every HR-touching process across all five Mission Support directorates: budget and accounting, contracting, facilities and security, human resources, and training and talent development. Each entry records the owning directorate, every directorate that touches it, the artifact crossing each boundary, and the system holding the record of truth. The census routinely surfaces processes no directorate believed it owned.
Output Process inventory · boundary register · directorate sponsor structure
As-is capture
Structured practitioner interviews, artifact harvest across forms, checklists, shared mailboxes and trackers, and live walk-throughs of real in-flight cases, documented in cross-functional swimlanes with one lane per directorate. Every step carries five attributes: actor, system, input artifact, decision rule, and both touch time and elapsed time. We map what people do, not what the SOP says they do, and record the gap between the two as a finding.
Output Swimlane maps · step attribute register · SOP variance findings
Friction analytics
The as-is baseline is scored, not narrated. Every step gets handoff count, touch count, cycle time, rework rate and approval depth, so later recommendations rest on a measured number rather than an opinion. The baseline is screened against six recurring bottleneck signatures, and every finding is validated with the practitioners who execute the step before it enters the report.
Output Scored baseline · signature findings · validated bottleneck register
To-be design in Workday's own vocabulary
A to-be map a configuration team cannot act on is a picture, not an engineering product. We design the future state directly against the Workday Core HCM business process framework: supervisory organization and position structure, staffing events, business process definitions with steps, condition rules, approval and to-do steps, security groups and role assignments, notifications, and the integration boundary for anything Workday will not hold.
Output Business process definitions · security and routing design · integration boundary
Dual-lens scoring
The RFI asks for administrator efficiency and a customer-centric posture in the same breath, and those goals do conflict. We score every to-be process twice: once for administrative burden covering touches, approval depth, exception rate and data-quality risk, and once for front-end experience covering steps to complete, self-service coverage, time to first response, and the number of places a user must go. Where the two scores pull apart we say so and put the tradeoff in front of leadership rather than resolving it silently.
Output Administrator burden score · front-end experience score · named tradeoffs
Validation and sign-off
Directorate-level walkthroughs first, so each directorate confirms its own lanes, then a joint cross-directorate session on the boundaries, where the real disagreements surface. The engagement closes on a signed to-be baseline plus a requirements traceability matrix running from measured as-is pain point, to to-be design decision, to the Workday configuration item that implements it.
Output Signed to-be baseline · requirements traceability matrix
Stage 3, in detail
The six bottleneck signatures
Named, countable patterns rather than adjectives. Each one has a detection rule, so two analysts screening the same baseline return the same findings.
Boundary thrash
A single case crosses the same directorate boundary more than twice. Almost always an artifact routed before it was complete.
Serial approval chain
Approvals executed in sequence that carry no dependency on one another. Candidates for parallel routing or outright elimination.
Re-keying
The same data element captured by hand in more than one system. The clearest predictor of data-quality defects in a new HCM tenant.
Shadow step
Work performed in email, spreadsheets or personal trackers with no system of record. Invisible to system-side analysis, and the most common source of surprise at cutover.
Wait-state dominance
Elapsed time exceeds touch time by more than roughly ten to one. The process is not slow because the work is hard, it is slow because it is queued.
Exception as norm
An exception path used in more than about one case in five. The documented process has quietly stopped being the real process.
The method is proprietary to House Strategies Group, LLC and is described here in support of the USPS OIG Business Process Engineer RFI.