Documents that Work, A Date with Updating

Effective writing achieves its purpose, without making the reader struggle.

One thing certain to make readers struggle is presenting them with information that is out-of-date.

Maybe a good start to the year is to make a plan to review policy, process and procedure documentation.

What are policies, processes and procedures?

At WritersInc, we see Policy documents as setting out the main rules of an organisation, stating the objectives of these rules and who or what the rules apply to, describing who is responsible for enacting the rules, and providing references to, for example, legislation.

Policies generally do not change much unless there are changes to legislation, or significant changes within an organisation.

Process documents describe how things are done, i.e. who does what.  Processes can be written, presented in a table and/or described using a diagram. There are several reasons for documenting processes:

• When new employees need to know where their role fits in and how their work interfaces with other people and/or departments
• When the business needs to become more efficient and more effective
• When a business is in growth mode and there is an inconsistent approach to service delivery and/or production.

Documenting who does what sounds easy, but it's not. When several departments are involved, you may find each one has a different view of the process. It can also be hard to get the right level of detail. Too much detail and the reader struggles with information overload, and too little might not give them the information they need.

Policy and process documents are not role specific, unlike procedures which are written for a particular job for a particular role. Procedures are likely to change more often than policy and process documents.

For us, Procedure documents are step by step instructions. We often set up procedures like a recipe, using headings  such as Introduction, Equipment Needed, Before you Begin, How to..., and Next Step.

Procedures really matter when you take on new employees, so ensure you get existing employees to test them to make sure the instructions are clear and correct. This will ensure they are fit for purpose.

Reviewing your documentation

Many organisations have a 2-yearly review cycle and we recommend reviewing documents in small batches through a 2 year cycle. However, many organisations struggle to maintain this schedule and the documentation gets out of date, and then it all gets very hard!

We recommend prioritising and updating the documents that are key to your business. Businesses completing a major documentation update may decide to have a gold, silver and bronze approach to their review process:

• Documents that are relevant to policies, processes and procedures that staff can work with, get a ‘once over lightly’ bronze review.
• Documents that have caused a few minor issues, get the silver treatment and the areas that are not clear are re-written, or the document is reformatted.
• Documents that cause problems and are key to the business get the gold treatment, where they may be restructured, rewritten and reformatted to meet new documentation standards.