Welcome to the Why Triaster: Webinar

Editor's note: this transcript was generated by AI and has been lightly edited for clarity and relevance — some sections have been shortened or removed, and minor transcription errors corrected.

Full transcript

00:00:34Host

Triaster enables organisations to capture, share, use, and improve processes. If you don't know too much about Triaster, we've been in this space for about 20 years or so. Quality managers and those responsible for business improvement know that process mapping can deliver many benefits, and these are only amplified as more people in your organisation start to use the process maps.

00:01:32Host

To engage end users, the process library must be easy to access, easy to use, and attractive to use — this is why we tend to brand our process library. Effectively, a process library is a process repository, a place where you store your processes. We view ourselves departmentally, so end users can find the information they need easily — if I was looking for a recruitment process, I'd go into the human resources area.

00:02:28Host

We recognise that to engage end users, it really needs to be corporately branded, with a good look and feel, and easy to navigate. Some of our customers even build an identity around the system and adopt a name. The look and feel needs to match the intended end user — some people will like things more engaging and fun, such as the AA process library, where you can see the little AA vans running around; if you're dealing with engineers, they might want something looking more functional and structured, such as Fugro's.

00:05:33Host

We use something called the noun-verb method: for every input you have, you're doing something to it with an activity, and then you're producing something. If you're trying to share content with a wide non-specialist audience, the noun-verb method is very easy for them to understand — it just reads from left to right, and a white box is an activity, something I do, versus something I use or produce, which are nouns.

00:06:45Host

Another major benefit of the noun-verb method is that it starts to identify waste within your organisation. For every activity, if I can't identify something I'm producing, the question begs: why am I doing it in the first instance? And this is where Triaster comes into its own, because it has the capability of linking end-to-end processes together based on inputs and outputs.

00:12:29Host

Behind activities, our customers will typically store responsibility, accountability — you've probably heard the term RACI: responsibility, accountability, consulted, informed. Risk is also stored by default. You could also put cost, time, cost per hour.

00:13:41Host

Behind the process page, we're starting to store information around change history — when the process was last updated, who approved it, when it's next due for review, and who the owners are.

00:16:35Host

Another report that's very popular with our customer base is the ISO 9001 listing by activity — this is where customers store the actual clauses against ISO 9001 where they feel they're being compliant. We've had customers say they've reduced their external audit days significantly through the use of storing this type of information.

00:19:23Host

There is also a minor workflow capability within the tool, primarily around alerts and approval cycles. Governance is very important — if content within the process library is not accurate, people will stop using it. Authors create process maps in a sandpit area — a play area where they can work without sharing content with anybody else. Once ready, it moves to a pre-live site, where designated approvers are emailed to review it. If approved, it moves to the live site, incrementing its version number, and can send out a "what's changed" alert.

00:22:56Host

We have a complete audit history across the processes — you can see exactly what changed between versions, which helps with continuous improvement, since organisations often make a change that hasn't been documented well, and a year later revert to old ways of working because they haven't recorded why they moved away from it.

00:23:57Host

There's also an embedded review cycle — when a process map is approved, you set the next review date, and your designated reviewer will be notified by email when it's time to review that process.

00:25:23Host

As people move more towards mobile devices, you can turn on a mobile site — effectively a streamlined replica of your process library, with the same search capability, links to documents, and navigation, just scaled to the device.