You’d be surprised how many large businesses run their operations based on memory and conversation alone. It’s very common that a critical piece of information comes from a tap on the shoulder, rather than any one reliable source.
Whilst effective in small teams, as a business grows the amount of knowledge within it grows accordingly. This knowledge can quickly become lost or difficult to find, meaning that its difficult to onboard new hires, the quality of processes become inconsistent and mistakes creep in.
Taking the time to create detailed process documentation empowers your team members by providing them with clarity on what they should be doing and what their expectations from others are. It also reduces the reliance on specific people and mitigates the issues that arise if a critical team member suddenly doesn’t show up to work.
There are a variety of ways to approach process documentation, ranging in the level of detail they provide and the amount of effort required to create them.
One thing’s for sure: you’ll be glad you did.
Standard operating procedures are one of the most well known forms of process documentation and its likely you will have come across at least one during your career. They’re a written set of instructions that define the key steps that need to be taken to carry out a process, including the people and systems involved.
The detail of standard operating procedures can vary wildly depending on your business. Highly-regulated industries or environments that need tight control, like manufacturing, are likely to include very granular steps. In general, most businesses should record only the most impactful and critical steps to ensure the essentials are being completed, whilst maintaining flexibility.
Best for: Onboarding operators with step-by-step instructions for how a process should be conducted. Acting as a detailed process artefact, they’re good for communicating hazards and emphasising key quality criteria that need to be met.
How-to guides are similar to standard operating procedures in that they communicate to an operator how a task should be conducted. They differ in that they’re typically used to train someone on how to complete one specific task.
For instance, a sales rep adding a customer record to a CRM system may know that they have to log the customer data as per the standard operating procedure, but may not understand how to use the system. The how-to guide will show them which application to open, which buttons to click and which fields to record data in, using screenshots as visual aids.
Traditional candidates for creating how-to guides include tools like Word and PowerPoint, although there’s an increasing movement towards recording tools like Loom and Scribe. Video recordings are an engaging education tool that typically pack more content into less time.
Best for: Showing someone how to complete a specific task using technology.
Flowcharts are one of the most basic but tested forms of process diagram. They consist of a set of shapes depicting different inputs, activities and decision points which guide the reader through the actions they need to take.
They’re a natural output from any business process mapping activity, are easy to understand and can be created with common business process mapping tools like Powerpoint, Visio, Miro and LucidChart.
Best for: Quickly communicating simple processes within a small team or system. Their humility should not be considered a weakness.
The mighty swimlane diagram picks up where the flowchart leaves off. Flowcharts are excellent at capturing what activities take place and when they need to happen, but lack the detail of who does them.
Swimlanes follow the familiar notation of a flowchart whilst breaking them out into separate rows (or swimlanes) that each represent a different individual, team or system. By doing this, they clearly demonstrate who is responsible for performing the activity or decision and when work is passed to someone else. This makes for an easy way to align teams on how work gets done across an organisation and what the expectations are from them.
Best for: Processes that span multiple teams or systems and where ownership needs to be clearly understood.
RACI matrices are effective tools for communicating which stakeholders are associated with a process, by assigning each a role that describes their level of involvement. Each stakeholder is categorised as one of the following:
For example, in a typical B2B sales processes, a sales rep would be responsible for carrying out the work, whilst the sales manager is accountable for the overall outcome. The legal team may be consulted on contract changes and the marketing team kept informed so they understand what happens after leads are generated.
Best for: Processes that span multiple teams or organisations and need granularity around the input required from each.
There are a variety of other process artefacts which are useful tools for speeding up the execution of a process and ensuring that data is being properly captured.
Templates for key documents such as proposals or contracts prevent a team from having to create new ones from scratch for each new customer, whereas forms are excellent at capturing structured data which can be used for automations, reporting and dashboarding.
Items like checklists are useful personal aids to promote quality or guarantee compliance with a regulation or standard. There’s no definitive list of artefacts you’ll need, as they vary depending on your business context - if it’s useful, roll it out!
Best as: Complementary tools that help an operator execute a process quicker than they’d otherwise be able to, whilst promoting quality and standardisation.
Process documentation exists to retain business knowledge and to communicate how a business operates. It’s there to ensure team members know what they’re supposed to be doing and what the expectations are of them. Common mistakes when creating process documentation include:
It’s important to note that processes can and should evolve over time as a business learns more about how it operates. That means that documentation needs to be regularly updated and that maintenance should be considered a key factor in deciding what documentation approach to use. The more lightweight, the easier it is to update over time.
Getting documentation right is one of the fastest ways to bring structure back to your business and and it’s easier with the right support.