So My Policies and Procedures Don’t Work. What Can I Do?

In ‘Top Ten Reasons’, we looked at why policies and procedures don’t work.  In this post, I’ll share a little about what we do when companies ask us to help improve their policies and procedures.

“Too long”, “unclear”, and “complicated” generally top the list of “Reasons Why Procedures Don’t Work”.  We often find that clients have complex flow charts, swim lane diagrams, and subway maps, usually with no clear starting or ending point or communications objective.  When workers look at these diagrams, they don’t know how to read them — they don’t know what the author is trying to tell them.

Get Organized, Then Consider Your Communications Objectives

While capturing everything you learned while studying your process may help you, you don’t need to show that around.  Think of your spaghetti diagram as homework, but think of your procedures as having a job to do. Your procedures are responsible for communicating know-how to someone who may have an alternate view of how a task should be done.

Think of your procedures as stories, with a beginning, middle, and end.  After discerning your intent, we look in our library for something we have composed already that tells a similar story. But our procedure communicates flow, or how raw materials, information and labor come together to create value for customers. By organizing the story around flow, we can simplify your procedures, not to mention the underlying processes. Flow should be a theme in all your procedures.

When we review a client’s procedures, we compare them to stories (e.g. procedures) that we have already written. We simplify client procedures so that they communicate flow. And we add measure and balance information at transition points to keep the underlying processes running smoothly.

Procedures Should Help Work Flow

Think of work flow as the current in your favorite fishing or boating stream.  When the stream moves at a “normal” pace, the water stays within its banks.  However, if a larger-than-normal volume comes downstream, or if the normal volume encounters an obstacle (like a bunch of fallen trees), the stream rises.  Soon, the stream has nowhere to go but out of its banks. What a mess.

To maintain work flow in your company, you need to know the measure and balance that should be maintained at each transition point in your process. For example, how much raw material should Receiving hand off to Production every hour?  Every day?  Such concrete measure and balance information determines the tempo of your processes. Workers need to know the appropriate tempo to prevent production managers from being inundated with material, and prevent inventory from backing up.

Procedures communicate flow.  And other kinds of documents and communications tools have other jobs. Thinking about and achieving all the communications jobs needed to roll out a process and keep it humming along is what we call “implementation”.

After Developing Your Procedures, You Have to Tell the Story

When we review a client’s procedures, we compare them to procedures, or stories, that we’ve already written. We simplify client procedures so they communicate flow.  And we add measure and balance information at transition points to keep the underlying processes running smoothly, at the appropriate tempo.

That may end up being a lot of information — more than you would want to write in text form as a procedure — so we deploy communication tools: maps, job aids, visual work boards, training, videos, etc.  These tools get the right information to the right people at the right time, so they can do their work at the right tempo and stay in sync.  Deploying communications tools in this way is how we achieve implementation.

I’ll cover implementation in a future blog post.

About Bizmanualz
Bizmanualz has been at the forefront of deploying business best practices since 1995 delivering Policies, Procedures and Forms; quality systems implementation; and strategic business process improvement to help business owners achieve the growth and expansion they envision.

Learn more about Bizmanualz solutions:

• Policies & Procedures Manuals
• Strategic Process Improvement
• Quality Training Courses

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Posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 under Business Improvement Services, ISO Quality Standards, Knowledge Management

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Originally published in 2009 by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title So My Policies and Procedures Don’t Work. What Can I Do?. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted with attribution only. www.bizmanualz.com