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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We always start our Well-Defined Processes Class by asking the participants “what’s wrong with your policies and procedures where you work?” and we always get the same answers.  Students come to the class from different industries, companies, and geographies and yet we still get the same answers every time.

People tell us how hard it is to keep their procedures up-to-date.  Information gets stale fast and it is difficult keeping procedures current and relevant without becoming outdated.  One reason for this is that the procedures are too long in the first place.  If you have a 35-page procedure then, yes, it is difficult to keep all 35 pages up-to-date.  Especially, if the procedure is unclear, overly complicated or just too difficult to understand in the first place.

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We talk about policies and procedures all the time but you may be wondering what is a policy and how does it differ from a procedure?

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