by: Sean Battles

You do your best to make sure your organization is operating as
effectively as possible. But if your policies and procedures are
incomplete, outdated, or inconsistent, then they are not driving the
performance improvement they should. When employees try to use
incomplete or undefined procedures, waste and costly errors soon
follow.

Case Study: Procedure Mistakes Add Up Quickly

Without knowing it, employees at a local auto parts company were
having a costly problem determining when to accept customer credit.
The company actually had a detailed credit application procedure,
including an exhaustive error correction routine, but the procedure
had one fatal flaw: it was not properly indexed.

Indexing Improves Procedures Usability

Without a way to readily locate and reference the applicable
procedure in the operations manual, employees could not find it and
were simply not using it at all, leading to an inconsistent process
and wildly varying output. Potentially valuable customers were
regularly turned away by some staff members, while others accepted
bad credit risks because they were unsure of which ones to reject.

A small omission like this can add up to thousands of dollars in
lost sales and good will. Even the most thorough procedures
inevitably have gaps that come from being "too close" to the process
or not following the basic rules of effective procedure writing.

Profit from Process Experience

To be effective, procedures must be action oriented, grammatically
correct, and written in a consistent style and format to ensure
usability. These guidelines, along with industry "best practices"
that are documented in auditable criteria, can be used to improve
your procedures:

1. Context. Actions must properly describe the activity to be
performed.
2. Consistency. All references and terms are used the same way every
time, and the procedure must ensure consistent results.
3. Completeness. There must be no information, logic, or design
gaps.
4. Control. The document and its described actions demonstrate
feedback and control.
5. Compliance. All actions are sufficient for their intended
compliance.
6. Correctness. The document must be grammatically correct without
spelling errors.
7. Clarity. Documents must be easy to read and understandable.

Quickly Improve Your Policies and Procedures without the Hassle

You can quickly resolve these usability problems and improve
performance, and also upgrade your documentation to "best practice"
standards without hassles or commitments. By beginning to improve
your documents, you will be able to identify areas for improvement.
And you can start today with the 7 Cs of “best practices”.


About the author:
Chris Anderson has over 18 years of sales, marketing and business
management experience working with business process design, software
and systems engineering for over ten years - consulting with
companies large and small. He is also co-author of policies and
procedures manual products, assisting in the layout, process design
and implementation of the information. Visit:
http://www.bizmanualz.com?src=ART62