What Is Workflows Documentation: How to Document Processes

Create a template to help standardize documents and facilitate the process. Be flexible—be willing to adjust a process as needed to ensure steps come naturally. Make documents public and visible to reach all employees and readers. Ask colleagues to review your document and provide feedback. Expand your steps to ensure all necessary information is included, such as potential hazards, troubleshooting advice or examples. Write a title and introduction describing what the process is, why or when users need to do it and how it fits into the big picture of the organization.

Multiple perspectives can be quite beneficial in uncovering these and ensuring your process documentation is clear and easy to follow. Sometimes this won’t have a significant impact but at other times it could completely change the outcome. Not only can documenting a process save time, but it also helps ensure that tasks get done correctly by outlining a consistent set of directions. It can also help prevent bottlenecks in day-to-day operations by spreading knowledge throughout a team instead of funneling all tasks through one person. Follow these best practices to get the most out of business process documentation.

Business Manuals

Previously, the company relied on a paper-based process to onboard employees. But this often led to delays whenever employees used an outdated form or filled out the wrong information. Each individual contributes to ensuring that all processes are properly documented and maintained.

Perform a simple risk assessment to uncover potential risks inherent to the process. Develop control points the process owner can use to evaluate risk exposure and take action as needed while they monitor the process. Archive or destroy obsolete documents as required by company policy. Monitor the process as documented and report on performance. Yet, consumers still needed to make purchases, but now it was more critical to do more things online. Contemporary businesses must have the capacity to react to change immediately.

Process documentation provides a uniform method of completing any business process. This process flow chart describes the activities required to deliver a functional app. Be it a web or mobile app, you can use this chart to keep multi- and cross-functional teams on track, all working to achieve the same goal. With this simple payroll process flow diagram, you can ensure that all of the criteria for paying your workers are met. Show your team how the system works, the benefits they will receive and how to report issues. Keep the entire team in sync and enhance your customer support process by visualizing the activities involved.

Template #10: Creative Brief

Improve processes – When analyzing how a task is performed, you can find areas to avoid redundant steps and inefficiencies slowing down productivity. You can personalize this template for other use cases like onboarding, product launches, billing processes and more. Access millions of design assets, icons, shapes, images and videos from Visme’s editor.

Pen & Paper – The easiest option is to just grab a piece of paper and draw the process flowchart. While your documents should be technically accurate, you’ll want to avoid using jargon or overly complex terms. Get straight to the point and only provide what’s necessary.

Crosscard reduced process documentation time by 93 percent using Scribe. When you’re done organizing the steps, put the roles against them. Mention the departments in control of the various tasks, and describe everyone who needs to be involved. Working as a team, decide which KPIs will be used to evaluate and improve the process.

How to Document Your Processes, a Step-by-Step Guide

It is an internal, ongoing documentation of the process while it is occurring—documentation cares more about the “how” of implementation than the “what” of process impact. A business is essentially a group of interrelated processes, and if these processes aren’t in writing, breakdowns can occur. Companies have repeatable processes fundamental to their successful operation, thus process documentation serves as a crucial guide for employees and managers to reference. Here’s an example of some process documentation intended to help users set up a documentation process. A relevant flowchart image is inserted to illustrate the guide and the process is split up into numbered steps.

Mention business process flow exceptions and what business process steps will be taken to manage the business exceptions. Gather all information on the business process steps from start to finish and identify what business event, triggers the business process. Decide which business process you are going to document and determine its purpose and scope. Establish what should be the desired outcome of the business process and list down what resources are necessary to carry out each of the business process steps.

Creating effective process documentation requires careful planning, organization, and collaboration. The following steps provide a structured approach to help you develop comprehensive, accurate, and engaging documentation. When team members start following a process document, they’ll need to know which tools and resources they’ll need to complete the process. This can be a particular software, a web-based tool, or even a specific document.

• A process guide is a step-by-step document that explains how to do something in your business.
• His insights on hiring and outsourcing can be found on over 250+ blogs on the Internet.
• When employees don’t know what to do you might risk them leaving the company altogether, resulting in a loss of revenue for your business.
• We recommend using pre-made templates to level up your process documentation and make it accessible to your team.
• A well-defined process includes clearly defined Suppliers, Inputs, Process steps, Outputs, and Customers and SMART objectives that can be charted over time.

By creating a measured outcome, you can evaluate performance based on specific metrics. Employees can feel secure in understanding their job function and the results they provide. These stakeholders are essential to planning, organizing, and creating your process documentation. Individuals selected to perform these roles can be from existing teams or a separate team explicitly designated for the tasks. You can create simple process flowcharts or more detailed process maps.

Supplier, Input, Process, Output, and Customer (SIPOC)

Go ahead and schedule some reminders now to regularly evaluate how well your documentation is working and to consider further updates and improvements. Make your process documentation available to everyone who might need it. The best way to do this is to give your documentation a home in a central repository of knowledge, like Confluence. That way, you know that all team members are using the same version of your documentation and that they can access it wherever they are. If your team has only one person who always handles a key process, what would you do if they took an unplanned leave of absence? Now consider how much more dire the situation would be if that person left the organization without passing along what they know.

Process mapping focuses on visualizing the process, usually with a flowchart. If you want to keep things more actionable, you can document procedures using a checklist. Team members will be able to easily understand the task and show their progress as they complete tasks. For example, there might be a new tool on the market that can speed up the process, or maybe a team member found a faster way to complete the task.

• Next, make sure the manager leaves the room in order to give the power and freedom to the team in the meeting.
• Team communication can be the difference between a good process and a great one, so be sure to communicate up front and frequently in order to create clarity.
• Process documentation also helps easily automate processes when needed.
• As mentioned above, process documentation allows for evaluation and potential reduction of the resources a business makes available.

And your debits and creditss won’t reinvent the wheel every time they tackle a repetitive workflow. He has been published in CustomerThink, PointVisible and SocialPilot. Productivity and efficiency witness a sharp drop when employees encounter challenges making heads and tails of their business processes. Business process optimisation – identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies by documenting the exact business processes.

Use the steps below to create a customized process document for your company. What is a process document and what does process documentation do? Process documentation outlines all the steps in a specific process or task to create a process document. So, it provides clear instructions on how to do it from start to finish. That way, anyone on your team can jump in and complete the task. Some tools can speed up procedure documentation and make it easy for team members to find them.

Any current documentation related to the process is linked in this field. These are also supporting documents to build, document and validate the process. Create flowcharts to represent important or complex steps. Improve processes each time by changing just the steps that aren’t working. If you don’t define that first, you’re likely to end up with a bunch of checklists that don’t connect to your larger business goals.