Consulting missions often involve designing or adapting processes in the target organisation. However, the fact that processes will be affected is not obvious at first, because we tend to start the mission with a predefined conception of the solution that stems from our area of expertise. Being primarily in IT, I tend to "see" IT-based solutions to every problem. But if we force ourselves to take a broader look at the problem, we discover that it is rooted in multiple processes and that the solution requires affecting these processes, not just IT. I believe specialists have a lot to gain from integrating process analysis in their consulting approach. Note that I do not advise to use only process analysis (read also my post on people-centric processes).

The 6 main steps of process design are:

1. Define the mission scope: elicit measurable objectives, identify stakeholders, and identify levers (also read my post on defining a consulting mission).
2. Perform value stream mapping (or value chain analysis), in both bottom-up (perception of people actually doing the work), and top-down (people managing the process/functional areas) approaches.
3. In parallel with step 2, change the mindset of people by questioning what they're doing, why and how they're doing it. In other words, foster a TQM or kaizen mindset across the organisation.
4. Identify potential improvements and estimate their ROI.
5. Together with stakeholders, prioritize improvements according to their ROI, objectives, and constraints (such as resources). Improvements involve process and organisational changes. This takes the form of a transition plan.
6. Coach the transition and assess results continuously to adjust the transition plan.

A few words on standards and tools. The most popular notation to describe business processes is BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation). The emerging format to represent BPMN descriptions is XPDL (XML Process Definition Language). A number of tools are available to design BPMN with XPDL file format. One of them is the Eclipse BPMN Modeler, a plug-in for the Eclipse platform (free and open source). Another interesting resource is the Process Wiki, which hosts an exhaustive collection of business processes.