Up until two months ago, I had never managed anyone else.  Now I was in charge.

I was afraid I would worsen the mess the company was already in. Employees scrambled to respond to executives commands.  Nobody knew what was expected of them, they complained of not having the materials to do their jobs and they couldn’t get their bosses attention.

I could sense the danger our company was in.  Some talked of quitting.  To the amazement of all my friends, I was now in charge.

“Can she really manage the company?”  I heard an employees whisper.  “No way!”  John exclaimed.  “She’s never managed anyone before in her life.”

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A “procedure” is a term used in a variety of industries to define a series of steps, taken together, to achieve a desired result.  Procedures explain how to accomplish a task.  A procedure is sometimes called a work instruction.  If you are preparing an ISO 9001 quality management system then the term procedure is used to describe a process, whereas a work instruction is used to describe something more basic like a specific step in a process.  For example, how to fill out a form.  Procedures are known in other ways too.

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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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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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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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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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Historically, compliance has been the focus of most knowledge management systems.  Documenting business processes with policies and procedures is required by many standards such as for ISO 9000 Quality Management Systems, Sarbanes Oxley Accounting and Finance, or Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  But if we look closer at the intent of these standards then we see that we should be more concerned with control, to improve quality or reduce the risk of failure.

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Hard-bound books in the ready-to-use procedure series provide concrete examples of prewritten policies and procedures for a wide variety of business and organizations.

St. Louis, MO — November 24, 2008 — Bizmanualz, Inc., a business publications, training and consulting company based in St. Louis, MO, today announced the release of a new series of hard-back books covering topics like Finance, Accounting, Computer & IT, Sales & Marketing and HR.

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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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The “finish line” — the $1,000,000 “prize”, cash savings for your business – is within sight.  In our articles on Inventory and Accounts Receivable, we found $250,000 worth of savings in each functional area.  We found another $250K could be saved in Sales and Marketing.  Accounts Payable is

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