Documenting Procedures 101
Documenting Procedures 101
Documenting Procedures 101
I love creating systems by documenting procedures and improving them; it's such an important part of any business. If you are not convinced, there are some great books such as " E-Myth Revisited" Michael E. Gerber, and "Work the System" by Sam Carpenter that you can read to learn more about the benefits of having great systems.
It seems that many businesses do have systems without documenting any of the specific procedures. I recently wrote an article called "5 Myths about Procedures and Automation" to point out about some of the misconception I keep seeing among business owners. Since then, I have had several chances to speak to some business owners who were still feeling uncomfortable about creating systems, which made me realize this:
Many people out there are thinking it takes special skills to document procedures. And that is what's stopping them from moving forward to create procedure documents. (Myth #3 in the 5 Myths that I listed.)
Come to think of it, I used to feel that way, too, until my boss forced me to document a procedure that I had come up with while working at one company years ago. And after that, writing policies & procedures somehow became a part of my job description, and the work got easier and easier as I created more documents.
So, this article is for those of you who are scared of documenting the very first procedure. Just follow these steps to create your first one, and I bet you will find that it's not a brain surgery.
Let's start with a simple recurring task that needs to be done on a regular basis. Write down all the recurring tasks you do every month or every week on a sheet of paper, or in a spreadsheet. It may have items like, "billing", "monthly e-newsletter", "bi-weekly teleseminars", and "weekly call with client xxx".
Choose one simple item from your list. Let's take "monthly e-newsletter", for example.
Start listing all the steps that are needed in order for the newsletter to be published. Leave some space (or one column) on the left when you do this. If more than one person is involved in the process, put the name of the person responsible for each step in parenthesis at the end. Don't spend too much time trying to figure out every single step at this point. You can add more steps later, if necessary.
Then identify the critical path. On the left-most column that you left in the step above, write down the due dates for the items that need to happen on a set date. For example, in our newsletter example, you can write down something like "2nd Tuesday" on the left of "Publish newsletter" step.
Next, look at other tasks and work backwards to decide when each of the other tasks needs to be done.
How long it takes to get it done.
Whether you should incorporate some cushion time to allow the reviews/revisions.
What can be done simultaneously, especially if more than one person is involved in the process.
Now you have all the dates, tasks, and who is responsible for each task. So let's pretty up the document to make it easy for you/your team members to understand and improve the process. There are many different ways to do this, so I will share some that I use:
Single-column straightforward procedure document/checklist
Simply list all the tasks in the chronological order. This is good enough especially if you do all the tasks on your own. Every month (or however often, depending on the task), I would also transfer these tasks into my calendar to make sure each item is taken care of on the day specified in the procedure.
Multiple-column procedure document with "responsibility" columns
I love this format especially when I need to clearly show who is responsible for each step. Create a column for a date, and one column for each team member involved in the procedure. Then just fill in this chart with the name/description of the task in a chronological order under the corresponding responsible staff. This format not only allows you to clearly see who is responsible for what, but also shows the flow of the concurring tasks (ie. Very often, one can work on one task while the others are working on a different task, shortening the whole process.)
Flowchart
When your procedure can have variations depending on other factors, having a visual flowchart to show the procedure can be very helpful. This is a great way to find any flaws in your procedure as well. For example, you may have to include a special section in your newsletter when you have a product launch. Then you would add a diamond shape that says "Product Launch?" in an appropriate place to branch out the process to show what happens under each of "Yes" and "No" scenarios.
Gantt Chart
Gantt chart is known as a great project management tool, and I think it can be a great help when you create a procedure especially because it can show the milestones, task durations, and task dependency. I don't think you can assign generic dates such as "2nd Tuesday of the month" in Gantt charts in packaged project management software, but you can just take the Gantt Chart concept and create your own on a sheet of paper or a spreadsheet, etc. as a part of your procedure document or as a preparation for writing down a more formal procedure. When I attended a Project Management seminar years ago, one thing I had to do was to create a Gantt chart as a wedding planner to figure out how many days it would take to plan a wedding from start to finish. If your procedure is as complicated as a wedding planning, I would strongly recommend creating a big picture flow with a Gantt chart, and then break it down to sub-procedures.
If you use any other document format for your procedures that works well, please share!
Oh, and now that you have written down all the recurring tasks in the step 1 above, you might as well create another procedure to transfer that data to your calendar every month, or however often you feel you should do that. Once you turn that into an official procedure, that would reduce the chance for you to miss those deadlines.
There you have it. See, it's all simple stuff! Now all you have to do is to keep improving it for more productivity and accuracy. Again, forget a formal, corporate-looking Policies & Procedures, and just create something that would work for you and your team.
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