A few questions for you:
How many of your business’ processes are documented and written out?
Would your team or employees know what to do if you were out of office unexpectedly?
Do your employees all perform essential tasks in a similar manner or is everything a bit more willy-nilly?
Do you find yourself having to accomplish the same tasks every month/quarter/year but not remembering how you did it the last time?
If your answers sounded something like this…
None
No
Willy-nilly
Yes
Then it’s time to think about creating documentation for your business.
“Documentation?” you’re thinking. “Yuck! I don’t have time to sit down and write out our processes, much less do I want to!”
Well, you’re in LUCK - I absolutely LOVE documentation.
Yes, you heard that right: I love turning thoughts in peoples’ heads into well-organized, easy to follow, step-by-step instructions people can return to again and again.
Here are the top qualities of excellent documentation that you should aim for:
Clear
Your documentation should leave nothing to the imagination. You want your instructions to be as clear as a glass window right after the cleaners were there. This means outlining each step, not skipping things that may seem obvious, and using directive language and diagrams so the readers know exactly what to do, when to do it, and how it should be done.
Concise
The last thing someone wants to do to complete a task is read a document that is 18-pages front and back in order to perform a regular task. You want to find a way to be clear, but also concise. Say what you need to say in as little words as possible, while maintaining the level of detail needed to be clear. It can be helpful to use imagery here…a picture is worth a thousand words!
Easy to Follow
You want the users of your documentation to know what to do at each step of the process. Lay out your documentation in a way that is easy to follow where it’s clear what steps happen when and what comes next. Use large numbers to indicate the order in which steps should be completed and note what the clear ‘signal’ is in a step that means you can go onto the next one.
Thorough
Your documentation needs to include everything from start to finish. Don’t assume your user knows the first steps of finding and opening the program or how to save their work. Imagine a brand new hire looking at this for the first time - what would they need to know? Write your documentation for them.
Accessible
Finally, what good is documentation if it lives on your local desktop? No one else is going to be able to read it if it’s on your laptop and your laptop is with you in Hawaii locked in your hotel room while you’re out snorkeling! Your documentation needs to live in a Cloud based file storage system (like Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.) or in a web accessible Wiki (like Notion, Confluence, etc.). Not only does it need to be stored somewhere accessible by everyone who may need it, its location needs to be known by the potential users. Creating a central SOT (source of truth) for all documentation is essential for your documentation to take the step from ‘dusty online space hogger’ to ‘helpful and useful resource’!
So, do you have processes and procedures in your business that you need documented with all the qualities mentioned above?
Schedule a free 1-hour assessment of your business processes, where you and I will review your existing processes to identify areas ripe with opportunity, be it documentation, optimization, training, or implementation!
Following our meeting you’ll get my expert recommendations for how to optimize your processes and sample documentation for one of your key processes.