"Is this documented anywhere?"
"We don't do it that way"
"Nobody except one person knows how to do this"
I'm sure you may have heard or said these sentences at some point in your career. Few things at work can be more terrifying than the day you learn an experienced teammate who holds years of knowledge is leaving the company. The mad scramble that ensues for the following months is something I wouldn't wish on any business.
Keeping your process documentation current and up to date is essential in creating sustainable processes and capturing the expertise of your experienced employees. Think about everything we know about science, math and history. Does any of it exist today if it wasn't written down at the time?
Let's look at a few characteristics of sustainable operations and how process documentation plays its part.
The operations produce a repeatable and consistent result:
The quality of your products or services rely on them being produced in the same way every time. If the process isn't repeatable, identifying the root causes of problems becomes incredibly difficult.
Think about following a recipe to make a meal instead of blindly throwing ingredients together from memory. While you may get it right every now and again, it'll be much harder to identify how to fix it when it goes wrong. But if you know the exact amount of ingredients and timing on each step, you'll know exactly what to change in order to get your desired result. That theory is crucial for all operations, and a company cannot deliver excellent service without it. Your process documentation serves as the vessel to maintain the quality and consistency of your business.
Experience and Expertise is Transferrable:
Have you ever played the game of telephone as a child? Someone starts with a piece of information, and it changes bit by bit with each person it goes through until the message you receive is nowhere close to what you started with. The same applies with internal training.
Training is only as valuable as it is easy to retain, and you can expect that every time it happens you're going to lose a little bit of information each time. Process documents are the only way you can ensure that the same message is delivered every time a training is done.
Through proper documentation companies can capture the learning they've achieved over time. You can outline why something is done the way it is, and what happens if you fail to do it the same way. You can share the exceptions and all the other specifics that are otherwise nearly impossible to teach and remember.
Employee turnover is an inevitable issue in this day and age, but you can minimize it's impact on your organization by making sure you have robust process documents.
At the End of the Day:
With how complex today's companies are, you need everyone to be pulling on the rope together in order to be successful. Everyone needs to be going in one direction and supporting each other along the journey. That vision can only be executed through proper implementation, which relies on strong process documentation.
DocSigma is aiming to make the creation of process documentation simple so you can realize your innovation and maintain high quality operations in a sustainable way.
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