
Who should own process description: the function or the business
The benefits of describing business processes
What a process description actually consists of
Which processes to describe first
How processes are described around the world
Which methodology fits your case best
Using flowcharts in process descriptions
A simple BPMN diagram and how to read it
Process analysis on the basis of the diagram
Process description models
Templates you can reuse
Software options and what each is good for
An example of describing a process with online tools
What you actually get as the output
How to implement the described processes
How to evaluate whether they work
Adjusting processes after the first run
Describing an onboarding process end to end
Describing recruitment and training
Describing performance management
Describing employee offboarding
Creating the project team and choosing the processes
Preparing the project concept
Defending the project with top management
Launching, reporting and closing the project
Further monitoring after closure
The analyst as a translator of business value into solutions
Problem versus solution mindset and telling a symptom from a problem
Formulating a business problem statement
Value-driven analysis: KPIs, metrics and business results
The Problem → Goal → Constraint → Metric framework
Stakeholder mapping and influence analysis
Elicitation techniques and asking the business the right questions
Working with conflicting requirements
Prioritisation by value versus effort
Types of requirements: business, functional and non-functional
User stories: structure, examples and anti-patterns
Acceptance criteria in the Given–When–Then format
Use cases, and BRD, SRS and PRD documents in practice
Definition of Ready for analysis
What a business process means for an analyst
The AS-IS and TO-BE approach
BPMN: the minimum necessary set of elements
Finding bottlenecks and waste, and linking processes to requirements
How to propose improvements rather than just diagrams
System context diagram and functional decomposition
User flows, scenarios, data objects and business rules
Non-functional requirements: performance, security and SLA
Traceability between requirements, processes and solutions
The analyst in Agile, Scrum and Waterfall
Working with the backlog and with changing requirements
Change requests and impact analysis
Managing scope and expectations, and typical mistakes
How to defend requirements in front of both business and IT
Who a troubleshooter is and how they differ from a crisis manager
Problem versus trouble: when troubleshooting is exactly what is needed
The four basic steps: localise, find the cause, propose, implement
Balancing speed and systems thinking without side effects
Beginners' mistake: treating symptoms instead of the root
From symptoms to substance: the right questions using 5W1H
SCQA: packaging a problem into a clear request
Logic tree and MECE: breaking the task down so nothing is missed
Cause and goal trees, mind mapping for visualisation
Checking the boundaries: what is in scope and what is out
5 Whys as the simplest root extractor
Ishikawa diagram and the 6M categories of causes
How to confirm a cause is the true one and not a neat story
Hypotheses versus facts: collecting the minimum data
Pitfalls: false roots and stopping too early
The 80/20 rule and finding the vital few factors
Pareto chart: visualising where most of the damage sits
Process mapping and bottlenecks through the Theory of Constraints
Check-sheets, data stratification and quick A/B checks
Prioritisation by impact against cost with a decision matrix
Brainstorming done right: rules and anti-rules
SCAMPER and Six Thinking Hats for going beyond the obvious
Mind mapping for fast idea branches
Barriers to creativity and ways to remove them
Selecting ideas through fast screening against criteria
The Ideal Final Result and the search for hidden resources
Contradictions: formulating and resolving them without compromise
Altshuller's 40 principles with business examples
Simplified ARIZ: steps from system to innovation
When TRIZ beats brainstorming and when it does not
Stratagems and paradoxical questions for hopeless tasks
Psychological inertia: recognising and breaking the pattern
Morphological analysis: combining parameters into new solutions
The focal object method for putting associations to work
Building your personal combination of techniques
The troubleshooter as moderator: neutrality and focus on the goal
Script for a collective session: analysis, ideas, choice, plan
Handling domination, conflict and idle talk
Tools: nominal group technique, Delphi, online whiteboards
Ethical principles and trust in the team
Profitability: breaking down revenue and costs to find the dip
Business situation, SWOT and 5P for strategy questions
Lean and Six Sigma for process speed and defect reduction
McKinsey 7S for organisational diagnostics
ADKAR and Kotter's eight steps for implementing solutions
The big map of methods from RCA to TRIZ and Lean
There is no golden pill: learning to combine techniques
A personal development plan: analytics, creativity, stress management
Continuous learning from every new case
Reputation, confidentiality and responsibility towards the client
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Every company has a process that everyone complains about and nobody has ever drawn. That is where the money is leaking.
What is going wrong right now
Work moves through your organisation along a path nobody has mapped. Handovers get lost between departments, the same document gets approved three times, someone waits two days for a signature that takes a minute, and every attempt to fix it produces a new regulation that people ignore within a month. When you ask why it takes so long, you get six different answers depending on who you ask — which is itself the diagnosis. Nobody can improve what nobody has described.
What changes after this course
You will be able to walk into any process, observe how it actually runs, draw it in a notation the whole company can read, and point to the exact step where the time and money go. Then you will prove the cause with data rather than opinion, design the improved version, calculate what it saves, defend it to management and embed it so it holds. This is the skill that turns a specialist into the person the business calls when something is broken.
Your instructor
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy, with more than 1.6 million course enrolments and over 150,000 professionals trained. Holder of PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. Built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals.
How the course is built
The course follows the real order of the work. It opens with process description itself: why it matters, the BPMN methodology, tools and templates, worked examples across hiring, onboarding, training and offboarding, and how to run a description project from concept to closure. Then it adds the business analyst's discipline — framing the problem, eliciting requirements, documenting them properly and handling change. The third part is diagnosis: root cause analysis with 5 Whys and Ishikawa, Pareto and Theory of Constraints for finding where the damage concentrates, then structured idea generation including SCAMPER, Six Thinking Hats and TRIZ. The fourth part is the improvement toolkit proper: waste, maturity, value stream mapping, 5S, 8D, SIPOC, DRIVE, ICOR, and the culture that keeps improvement going. The course closes from the operations chair: metrics, bottlenecks, cross-functional rhythms and how to keep order from decaying as the company grows.
What is included
• Lifetime access to all course materials
• Active instructor support in the Q&A section
• Udemy Certificate of Completion
• Practical assignments and real business cases
• A section with additional courses, tools and resources
Why start now
Every quarter the undocumented process runs is another quarter of losses nobody can name. Companies do not promote people who complain about how things work — they promote the ones who can show, on a diagram, exactly what to change. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.