Why prozesselefant.de? Why process elephant?

What's up with this process elephant? What is the idea behind it?

The process elephant is used to symbolize the heaviness or stolidness of existing, long-established processes and structures.
Processes and routines are performed (out of habit) every day without anybody asking the questions: "why and for what reason?"
Should at some point after all these or similar questions be asked, chances are good that the answer is something similar to: "well, we always did it like this" or "the colleagues in the other department require this". Even slight modifications to these long-established processes can often be a very difficult and sometimes also bothersome task. To display this situation is the intention behind the process elephant.

Processes are everywhere! However, more often than not they are undefined, not documented, not coordinated and/or not target oriented.

As a side note: The idea to the process elephant arose out of a lively discussion with colleagues about the debatable turtle or 8W model, which is basically a process analysis model based on a slightly modified 7W Kaizen checklist. Its graphical representation is a turtle where the process input enters the turtle through its mouth, gets processed, and then exits through the turtle's backside...