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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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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Last week we identified the most common process maturity level in many organizations, phase one — Reactive.  Few organizations are able to advance much farther up in management system maturity.  This week we will look at the next two levels in our process maturity model that describe the phases in which an effective management system comes to life.  The Documentation and Stability Phases.

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Your management system consists of business processes that interact with each other through documents and records.  Yet in many companies the system appears to be functioning whether anything is documented or recorded.  Can this be an effective management system?  It depends on the process management maturity of your organization.

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It is our pleasure to announce the launch of www.policiesandprocedures.com, a brand-new website dedicated to offering hundreds of instantly downloadable policies, procedures and forms.

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In this series our topic is how to write procedures: what advice do we have to give about writing procedures? Most importantly – employ the writing process. The writing process considers activities that successful writers engage in while producing a piece of writing, and it applies whether one is writing an essay, a business letter, or a procedure. These writing activities are typically divided into three steps or phases – Planning, Drafting, and Revising. Having covered Planning and Drafting, let’s turn our attention to Revising.

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Recently we published a series of articles covering why you need policies and procedures, and it included how to decide when you need to create procedures. Now that you understand why you need procedures, let’s talk about how to write procedures.

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What a year this was. A new policies and procedures manual. New training courses. And, most importantly, over 50 articles on various aspects of business management and process improvement. Our goal here at Bizmanualz is to help you streamline your processes and improve your business performance. If our articles help you achieve this in any way, we feel like we have succeeded.

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Question of the month: Why is a phased approach useful when you are writing policies and procedures for your organization?

Our topics in November revolved around writing policies and procedures.

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In the past weeks we have explored the very basic reasons why an organization needs procedures.  My belief is that, no matter how many complex explanations you give or long lists you create, it all boils down to four basic reasons: 

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