Writing the process down in the order it happens

Most companies have the process written down somewhere. It is usually organised by team: what sales does, then what operations does, then what finance does. Each section is accurate. Read end to end, it describes something nobody experiences.

Work does not happen by department

A job crosses four teams and comes back to two of them. Written by department, that journey is scattered across four sections, and the return trips do not appear at all, because from inside each team a job coming back looks like a new job arriving.

Write the same process in the order the work actually moves and the return trips become impossible to miss. So do the crossings, which is where the waiting lives.

What changes when you reorder it

We do this on paper in an afternoon, and two things tend to fall out.

• Duplicate checks. The same information verified twice by two teams, each unaware the other does it, because in a department-shaped document they sit forty pages apart.
• Steps with no reader. A form completed carefully at step three that nobody opens until step nine, by which time it has been superseded by an email.

Neither is anybody's fault. Both are invisible until the page is put in the order of the work.

Keep it short enough to be read

A process document that runs to sixty pages will be read once, by the person who wrote it. We aim for something a new starter can read in a morning and recognise on their first day.

Short also means it can be kept current. The reason most process documents are out of date is that updating them is a project.

Then leave it where the work is

A description that lives in a folder nobody opens has the same value as no description. Put it where the job is: alongside the queue, in the system people already have open, on the wall if that is what gets read.

Written in the right order, kept short, and left within reach. That covers most of what a process document needs to do.