processcurating

Processcurating is a practice of systematically collecting, evaluating, and organizing an organization's processes to improve transparency, consistency, and governance. It combines process documentation, standardization, and lifecycle management to ensure that core workflows are known, accessible, and maintainable. The aim is to capture both formal procedures and tacit workflows into living references that can be reviewed and updated over time.

Scope and methods: Processcurating starts with an inventory of processes across functions and value streams. It involves mapping inputs and outputs, assigning owners, and classifying processes as core, supporting, or enabling. It uses standardized templates (purpose, roles, steps, inputs and outputs, metrics) and employs tools such as flowcharts, BPMN, process mining, and knowledge bases. Updates are governed by version control and periodic reviews to reflect changes in technology, policy, or strategy.

Applications: It supports operations, IT, product development, and knowledge management by improving onboarding, handoffs, and compliance. For example, a software delivery process can be curated to codify branching strategies, code review requirements, testing procedures, and release criteria, while a content-production pipeline can be curated to document ideation, drafting, review, and publishing steps.

Benefits and challenges: Benefits include greater transparency, reduced process redundancy, easier training, faster risk mitigation, and consistent customer experiences. Challenges include keeping documents up to date, determining scope, cross-team ownership, tool integration, and change fatigue among staff.

Relation to other concepts: Processcurating intersects process management, knowledge management, and process mining. It is complementary to process improvement; while improvement initiatives optimize performance, curating creates and maintains the authoritative reference that enables those improvements to be implemented consistently.