It’s been at least three decades — probably more — since everyone began talking about the coming of the “paperless” office.  Personal computers arrived about 30 years ago, which were soon followed by networking, the public Internet, and wireless computing. Yet we are still not paperless.  In fact, now that we have inexpensive laser printers and digital copiers, we have more paper than ever in the office.  Why?  Whatever happened to the promise of the paperless office?

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Are great quarterbacks born as great football players or did they have to learn how to play football?  Great players practice all week for the game on Sunday.  But what do they practice?  They are already great.  They practices plays — football procedures.

In business, employees are expected to perform their job all day long.  But how much time is allocated to practicing their job?

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Companies are using a wide variety of intranet software solutions to develop policies and procedures for multiple departments.  Common policies and procedures software solutions include editing in MS-Word, publishing in PDF, and managing files in SharePoint.  You can try putting most of your information on a wiki, but a wiki can be an inefficient solution for keeping documentation up-to-date and under control.  Adobe has a product called RoboHelp that’s good for maintaining a single source and distributing various versions and revision changes to a mixture of channels.

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Policies and procedures need to be managed, not simply collected, as we oftentimes tend to do.  Add in the offspring of policies and procedures — records — and you have the making of a problem common to business…a lack of control.

Control of records and documents is critical to compliance.  ISO 9001 requires document control, record control, and specific procedures that clarify how you are maintaining control.  HIPAA requires access control.  Sarbanes-Oxley requires access and revision control.  Document and record control are at the heart of many of the various compliance schemes businesses encounter.

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Not all processes require procedure writing.  There’s a lot of overhead associated with every business procedure you write.  Therefore, the more business procedures you write, the more procedures you have to edit, implement, train, audit, and

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Project Execution, Project Monitoring & Control, and Project Review & Close

The first phase in any project management process is Project Initiation.  The second phase is Project Planning.  Together the first two phases represent the seven “Ps” of planning:

Proper Prior Planning Prevents a Pretty Poor Program.

But you are not preparing planning for planning’s sake, you need the deliverables.  The next phase – Project Execution – is the area most people spend most of their time.

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Last week, we learned about the five phases of project management.  Each phase of project management has a distinct purpose, importance, and set of outputs designed to ensure that the project manager is moving the project towards the desired results.  The first phase is Project Initiation.

Phase I – Project Initiation

The primary purpose of Project Initiation is to discover the project’s scope — where are its boundaries?  As you see in Figure 1, you need to determine and document the User Requirements & Project Assumptions, produce a Business Case Justification & Feasibility Study, and put together a Project Charter and Project Team.

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Today, everything is a project with more and more people finding themselves in a project management role of some type.  You don’t have to have the title of Project Manager to manage projects.

A Project is a temporary collection of related tasks to achieve a desired and usually unique result.

What do you think? Do you find yourself managing a collection of related tasks to achieve a desired result?  If so, you qualify as a project manager.  Businesses today are evolving, downsizing, and pushing more work down the organization chart.  You may be a project manager and not know it.  But what if you haven’t been trained as a Project Manager with the necessary skill and tool sets?

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Over the last four weeks, we have focused our discussion on process maps. We’ve tried to answer some of the most common questions about process maps by taking a look at seven different types of process maps and how they’re used to describe processes.  A process is a structured set of activities that transforms inputs into outputs, but the way we describe a process may vary dramatically, from a text-based procedure to different forms of process maps.

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