Policies and Procedures: What Would You Do?
| by Steve Flick | ||||
We are currently in the midst of surveying our customer base for their opinions on how to improve our policies and procedures manuals, the bread-and-butter of our company. We’re asking them questions like, ”Have you used the product?”, “What was your primary reason for purchasing it?”, “How satisfied are you?”, and “How do you manage (control) your documentation?”
Organizations usually buy our policy and procedure, or “PnP”, manuals for the content and structure they provide. Think of policies and procedures as the plans and materials for erecting a modern office building: it’s easier for a builder to work from a set of plans, with the materials identified and laid out for the task, than it is to start “from scratch”.
There are several major differences between PnP manuals and buildings, however. Thousands of years of accumulated wisdom, as well as enforcement of clear, strict building codes, ensure that adverse outcomes in construction (i.e., spontaneous building collapse) are unlikely to occur. With policies and procedures, there is no strict code – and no laws of physics – to say the outcome must be “this” or “that”.
Companies are free to do what they wish with the plans and materials, somewhat like a child playing with Lego blocks. There’s no rule set in stone that says, “You must use all the procedures we provide you.” There is no governing body to tell you to implement the procedure exactly as it’s written, or to forever keep the document in the same format in which it came (i.e., Microsoft Word). In fact, we encourage our customers to shape the policies and procedures we provide to their unique circumstances.
What do you do once they have the product? We solicit your input from the moment we deliver the manual, but few actually take us up on the offer. That is the main motive for our current research — what are you doing with our Policies and Procedures manuals? More importantly, what can we do to make them better for you?
Now, I ask our readers who’ve yet to purchase one of our products, “What do you think?” How do you develop and manage your policies and procedures? How do you maintain them? How do you communicate PnP to your workforce? How do you ensure timeliness and availability? How do you ensure cooperation? How do you ensure VALUE? And…given what you now know…what might you do differently?
Categories:
Knowledge Management
Tags:
customer requirements • improvement • ISO Quality Standards • operational improvement • Policies and Procedures • processes • quality • value
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.
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Originally published in 2009 by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title Policies and Procedures: What Would You Do?. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted with attribution only. www.bizmanualz.com
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