Process Documentation: A How-To Guide With Examples 2023 2022

The best way to test your process workflows is by regularly collecting feedback from employees. Their suggestions will introduce you to a whole new dimension, so you can adjust your workflows accordingly. Next, you can even interlink articles and add a “Related Articles” section at the bottom of every page.

Only the people working in the process really know how the process is done. So, get all roles together in a ‘workshop’ and jointly visualise the process from end to end. Mitigate risk – Well-defined processes provide operational consistency. No matter who is completing a task, you can rest assured that the risk of errors is minimized. You can download your visuals in PDF or PPTX format or share them online with your audience using a public or private link.

Create Governance Rules for Updating Your Documents

Organizations across a vast range of sectors use ProcessMaker’s iBPMS with process documentation technologies to put their processes into action swiftly. Every organization relies on processes to function effectively. Business activities are achieved through specific processes. These distinct tasks are used to improve consistency around business activities.

Identify which articles get the most views and make sure they are easy to find within your system. Collect feedback from your employees about whether they find the documentation helpful and use it to make appropriate changes. Some documentation might be more useful to your employees than others. Once you’ve finalized the documentation it’s time to make it available to the rest of the organization. Without process documentation, your company is in the dark when it comes to carrying out tasks.

Final review

Gather individuals from the teams or departments that will be involved in completing the process you are documenting to make sure what you have created is clear to them. The best process documents include a brief thorough description of the broader sense of the process. Having process documents available and in use also helps to negate the all too common errors caused by miscommunication or altogether lack of communication. WithBPM software, you can automate processes and reduce the time that employees spend on manual tasks. That means writing in a way that employees can understand without having to ask for clarification.

You will have more employees, more steps, more tasks, and more processes. Hoping for everything to organically fall into place is how many businesses lose steam. Creating and maintaining accurate process documentation is one of the most effective methods for keeping internal processes efficient and working as intended.

Review and Evaluate

The best practice is to start with an action verb (fill out, type in, etc.) and then describe each action or task. This is a high-level process map that results in a very detailed document. Most commonly expressed as a table, it provides practical ways of understanding the phases of a process. There are multiple stakeholders in creating documentation. These individuals are the Process Owner, Documentation Custodian, and Technical Writer.

• And now that you know how to document a business process, prepare yourself for more efficient processes.
• Each individual contributes to ensuring that all processes are properly documented and maintained.
• If applicable, there is a placeholder for project sponsors and stakeholders.
• Process experts know that often the sum of cases needing an exception is greater than the number of cases going through your business as a ‘clean case’.
• Document management software helps you get all your documents properly filed and easily accessible to the right people at the right time.

what is an enrolled agent Process Management Document, plan and optimize business processes. Creately for Enterprise Enterprise-grade online collaboration & work management. You can use Tettra to document all your processes by creating libraries and wikis where everyone can collaborate and update as they go along. Since Tettra is focused on knowledge management, it has multiple helpful features to allow you to build and collaborate documents with your team. Although this DMS isn’t beginner-friendly, it’s one of the best tools for scientific process documentation. Document management software helps you get all your documents properly filed and easily accessible to the right people at the right time.

Check and Test the Process

But as you create new processes for the post-pandemic world, now is an excellent time to reevaluate and improve your business process-documentation procedures. Free and in the cloud with HEFLO you can model, analyze, map, optimize, automate and, of course, document processes in an agile way, and all this in BPMN 2.0 notation. Complete business process documentation software, which creates professional and beautiful documents. HEFLO isbusiness process documentation software in which you edit the online process flows and the documents are automatically generated. When documenting processes and procedures, don’t think of it as an event. Applying these ideas to your ten core business processes will improve your results.

Once you have documented the process, place a link to the document section here. Even if the process is documented, you still need to validate it. I’ll explain what process validation is and ways to do it in just a bit.

And you’ll leave giant gaps in your final documentation, leaving space for inconsistencies. Keep in mind that how difficult a process is to document all depends on its scope. Smaller processes will be faster and easier to document than larger processes . Trial and error, plus new knowledge and tools, lead to lower costs, shorter production times, and tastier brownies.

Mural’s templates guide you through planning a productive brainstorming session, structuring the meeting itself, and capturing the results. If you never seem to get around to tackling process documentation, choose a time in the week and block it on your team’s calendar. Or, pick a month or quarter to dedicate to updating process documentation together. Process documentation means you have a record of the protocols your employees need to follow so you can ensure compliance.

Business process documentation software that uses best practices

Unions have perfected this approach with very clear job descriptions and union work rules that prohibit any activity that is not clearly part of their checklist. Productivity should be the focus, not blind adherence to the tasks that must be accomplished. But with the wrong tools, this work can quickly turn into a cumbersome process — think endless email chains and accidentally deleting parts of the work.

Your documentation is only as good as the data you get back. Although self-reporting is an important part of this, the data you receive must be validated. You’ll use this data to improve your process at some point, so you must be confident with the data to make these operational changes. Careful messaging and structured communications are critical to the success and validity of documenting your processes.

This section and the next three are completed for each category/function you defined earlier. User version is the copy used and optimized for end-users to reference during daily operations. SME validation involves carefully selecting subject matter experts for the process and have them validate the accuracy of the data. Ensure these people have enough field experience to know how the process is done. Regardless of how you organize and distribute the input worksheet, here are some tips for making collecting your processes effective and efficient.

Construct a process flowchart to visually represent the steps. Special interest groups can use process documentation to start trouble. Stakeholders behave differently when they know what they say is being included in process documentation. The team must go through your newly created SOP and make sure that all necessary steps are indicated in the process document.

The main part of your process document should be listing the steps needed to complete the task. This section should strike a healthy balance between simple and detailed. You want to keep it simple enough to follow easily, but detailed enough to be done correctly. Things tend to work much differently in practice than they do in theory, so you will need to allow space for your team to test out the documentation and provide feedback. This is an iterative process, after all, and your outcomes can only be as good as the processes in place to reach them. Your process documents should be tested and refined as many times as needed to achieve optimal results.