Using Lifecycle Hooks in Business Process Design

One of the challenges that did not make the cut when discussing how to overcome barriers to visualizing your business processes and integrations is how busy diagrams become with all of the associated actions when designing a business process.

Let's take a look at how we can apply lifecycle hooks, which is typically leveraged in systems and software design, to make it easier to design and document business processes.

Metaphorically, consider our day as a lifecycle to see how this works:

• When we wake up, we have completed a stage of the lifecycle
• There are certain actions that we must (read: should) do at that point
• In some cases, the order of those actions matters
• We can associate these actions with a hook, which in this case would be labeled something like "after waking up"

For someone with few responsibilities (e.g. an ancient human), there are likely not many actions in the day, so using lifecycle hooks might be overkill.

However, for people with more responsibilities (e.g. a single working mom to three kids that has been forced to commute because of a return-to-office mandate), there are many more actions and the sequence of those actions matters.

Lifecycle hooks bring sanity to thinking about and designing a process with that level of complexity.

As you're working through designing and documenting business processes, each step in the process will have a few hooks on which you can hang actions.

Let's say we're designing a business process for onboarding a new customer, and one of those steps is the initial kickoff meeting. Here are the hooks and associated actions:

• Before: create kickoff deck with customer's details
• During: validate understanding of services and scope
• After: schedule follow-up sessions, send deck presented
• Exception: notify account executive and sales manager about misaligned expectations, schedule time with both to discuss live

By organizing our thoughts and documentation around hooks, we're able to more easily:

• Read the end-to-end process and dive into details when needed
• Identify what is missing in the process's design and documentation
• Flag common actions that can be abstracted into composable pieces of work

Tomorrow, we'll expand on that last piece to see how it becomes easier to document, design, and build those actions.

TLDR: Use lifecycle hooks (before, during, after, and exception) to organize actions associated with each step of a business process to improve readability and identify what is potentially missing.