If your company is like most, you’re storing your policies and procedures on a file server. Perhaps your working drafts are in one folder, approved versions are in another folder, and previous versions are archived in yet another folder. Some companies will create folders for the different clauses of ISO 9001 or arrange documents according to functional areas or departments. A lot of these companies aren’t even practicing the most basic security techniques, like limiting “read-write” privileges to a select few. (more…)

Policies are most often rooted in undesired consequences.  Something happens that shouldn’t — a door isn’t secure from the outside and someone gets in your building who doesn’t belong — and a policy (i.e., “That door is for exiting the building ONLY in case of emergencies.  It is NEVER to be used as an entry.”) is enacted.

A few — such as high-level, or corporation-wide — policies are designed to promote desirable consequences for an organization, as well as prevent undesired ones.  In this article, we’re going to stick with the first kind.  In any case, the best policies give everyone in the organization a sense of purpose and direction.  So…how do you write a good policy? (more…)

In part one of this article, you learned the first three steps in the Bizmanualz process of making a policies and procedures manual – research, design and development, and procedure writing.  Now, as Paul Harvey liked to say, “Here’s the rest…of the story.” (more…)

A lot of work goes into developing every Bizmanualz Policies and Procedures manual.  We start by conducting…

1. Subject Research

In the not-too-distant past, we primarily searched the Internet for clues as to what people wanted. We’d find what topics people were interested in by doing the same thing you do: searching by keywords. (more…)

You’ve just been given the task of writing a new procedure that documents an existing business process.  You make sure you understand, and you close with, “I’ll get on this process right away.”

That’s when your boss says, “Process? Did I say ‘process’? I meant processezzz! Plural!”  And before you can blurt out, “What do you mean?”, the boss says you need to develop procedures for all accounting processes, not just the one.  Oh, and he wants them by the end of the month!

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Writing procedures is an exercise in controlling the cost of compliance.  You’re trying to comply with customer expectations, management objectives, government regulations, and/or industry standards, making compliance expensive.  Regardless of the reason for compliance, wouldn’t you want to write as few procedures as possible if you could still conform to the compliance mandate and keep your compliance costs to a minimum?

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You’ve written a new procedure.  Your procedure review identified completeness, correctness, and subject matter applicability.  You feel you’ve caught your procedure writing errors and the procedure’s ready to go…but go where?  How do you determine if your new procedure is working?

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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 (more…)

Your process is not living up to expectations, so you’ve decided to implement standard operating procedures (SOP) to improve process consistency, compliance, and effectiveness.  However, that project is stalled: employees are not buying into your proposed changes, and management is growing impatient.

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Business and organizational development is about business process change: not as in “process change - the event”, but “process change - the journey“.  Your business processes change in response to market forces, competition, regulations, customer demand, the economy, culture, personal beliefs, and many other factors.  The question isn’t about what is causing the business process changes — we know your business processes are going to change — the question is…
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