As a leader, you are only as good as the people you lead.  So it’s up to you to make the people around you better.  You need to help them develop themselves, so that they’re smarter, more capable—and ultimately better at doing what needs to be done, like achieving your organization’s goals.  What’s the best way to help the people around you be the best they can be?

Writing Policies and Procedures

I know it may sound obvious, but the truth is you know how you want your organization to run. 

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Customers and readers alike tell us how difficult it can be to keep their policies and procedures up to date. Due to the ever-increasing rate of change, your policies and procedures can get “stale” (ineffective) very fast.

One reason for this might be that your procedures are too long. If you have 35-page-long procedures — especially if that’s all text — it’s probably not fair to expect your employees to understand, let alone use, them. At that length, there’s the very real risk that your procedures are unclear, overly complicated, and just plain boring.

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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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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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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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If your goal is ISO certification, the best method is to create a compliant QMS in stages.

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Question of the month: How can you make sure that procedures are used in your organization?

How effective are procedures that languish in file drawers or collect dust in binders… never used or seeing the light of day? What is the point of having procedures like these? We have talked in the past about why you need procedures, now let’s talk about how to get those procedures used.

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Our previous essay listed the typical problems with procedures that we hear from those attending our Well-Defined Processes class. We divided these problems into two broad categories: poorly written and not used. The previous essay also covered problems that fit into the “poorly written” category.

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According to comments we receive from attendees at the conclusion of our two day Well-Defined Processes course, one of the more enjoyable aspects of the course (besides the excellent instruction and great materials!) is the interaction that typically takes place between participants.

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