Process Documentation Writing Tips
When I’m doing something that involves multiple steps, you can be sure I want to remember it. Sometimes my brain can’t be trusted with that, so process documentation is the answer. Whether you’re completing recurring tasks or creating a new program, process documentation can help you formalize your business endeavors. In fact, creating documentation helps improve coordination, structure, and consistency in your organization.
This post gathers best practices for process documentation. Here, you’ll learn:
- What is process documentation?
- Why Process Documentation Matters
- Process Documentation Benefits
- Creating Process Documentation
- Tips for Process Documentation
Process documentation could be a step-by-step tutorial on a new software tool or an onboarding document for new hires. This practice allows you to be proactive in designing internal systems and processes that save time, capital, and valuable energy.
Why Process Documentation Matters
If you lack structure and details for core organizational processes, your business is more at risk for inefficiencies. Process documentation provides an additional layer of protection for your organization.
The lack of documentation can lead to the following organizational challenges.
Lack of Information Retention
If just one person has extensive knowledge about a process, the organization is at risk of losing that knowledge if they leave. Process documentation helps outline the information that this person holds and allows you to store it in a way that others can access.
Redundancies
Without a roadmap, there’s a higher chance that time will be wasted on unnecessary or repetitive tasks. Process documentation can help you outline and visualize these redundancies so that you can create a better solution.
Bottlenecking
Bottlenecking can happen at any stage of the process. It’s important to find out where bottlenecks come from and why. Identifying these delays and hurdles will be helpful when creating more efficiency.
Revenue Loss
Less productivity means more time and energy is exhausted on the execution of processes in your organization. Team members then have less availability to take on new projects. This disorganization can lead to lost revenue, or even turnover, at your business.
Process Documentation Benefits
Process documentation is critical to the overall function and flow of the systems within your organization. Other common benefits of process documentation follow.
It provides transparency.
Lack of alignment can quickly turn into a nightmare. “Even in smaller organizations, the threat of siloing and lack of alignment is very real. Process documentation provides transparency to collaborating team members, management, and stakeholders as a single source of truth,” says Amanda Sellers, manager of EN blog strategy at HubSpot.
It ensures business continuity.
If your coworker suddenly left the company, they best not be leaving with all the secrets to how they do their work. ‘Have you ever heard your coworker say ‘What would this place do without me?’ …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
