SIPOC

Read it from the middle out. The process column holds the main steps, usually five to seven, at the level a manager would describe them. To its left are the inputs those steps need and the suppliers who provide them. To its right are the outputs the process produces and the customers who receive them.

It is deliberately high level. A SIPOC does not show who does each task or how long it takes; it shows the boundaries of the process and what crosses them. That is exactly what a team needs to agree before it starts.

Use it at the very start of a project, in the first working session, when people use the same name for different things. "The referral process" means one thing to the team that receives referrals and another to the team that does the first appointment. Filling in a SIPOC together settles where the process starts and stops, which is the first line of a good project charter.

It also finds the customers nobody mentioned. Most teams list the person they serve directly; the SIPOC often adds the commissioner who pays, the employer who recruits, or the next team in line.

Not to find delays or waste: it has no times in it, and a value stream map does that job. Not to show who does what or where hand offs fail: a swimlane map does that. And not at a level of detail that fills a wall. If the process column has twenty steps, the SIPOC has become a process map, and it has stopped doing its own job.

Check that every output has a customer, and every customer receives something. An output with nobody to receive it is work that may not need doing. Check that every input has a supplier: an input with no supplier is usually one that arrives late or incomplete, because nobody is responsible for it. And check the first and last steps: they are the scope of the project, and they should be the ones the sponsor signs.

An employment support service wanted to cut the time from a referral reaching it to a participant's first appointment. Its first session produced the SIPOC below. The entries are illustrative, of the kind such a session produces.

Two things came out of it at once. The team had been treating the eligibility check as the start of its process, but the SIPOC put the start at the moment a referral arrives, which added two days nobody had been counting. And the commissioner, who pays by results, appeared as a customer of the first appointment record, which changed what that record needed to contain.

Start with the process column: agree the first and last steps, then fill in three to five between them. Then work right, listing the outputs and who receives each, and then left, listing what each step needs and who provides it. Keep it to one page. When the team can read it aloud and everyone nods, it is done.

SIPOC belongs to Define. It sets the scope in the project charter, names the customers whose needs the project must meet, and gives the value stream map its first and last steps.