Nine Months, Nine Years, Nine Days, or Never
When I set out to develop and project manage a company’s first-ever process manual, it took me nine months and three hundred pages to complete. For many companies, it could take nine years to get all the pieces together. Or it may just never happen at all. Now, I do it for businesses in nine days with roughly thirty pages. While it’s virtually impossible for people inside a company to execute their process manual in just nine days, it is entirely possible for a committed organization to make it happen in ninety days. In this post, I’m going to share how.
If your business is relatively mature, then you have the right resources, time, and people to dedicate to this, so now is the time to commit for ninety days.
If your business is evolving quickly, and you’re not sure how things are going to change in the future, you will start where you’re at today and this framework will ensure your processes evolve with your business.
If you think you don’t have time to dedicate to documentation, know that the time you invest now, just ninety days, will pay you back forever.
If you’ve tried this before and your processes exist but they’re on the shelf or somewhere in the drive and you know no one is following them, apply this formula to ensure that doesn’t happen again.
Like any other critical business decision, you must commit to proper planning, management, execution, and follow through, or the long-term effects of a failed attempt could be more harmful than good. It’s just ninety days.
Below is the step-by-step overview of how to plan and execute your process documentation in just ninety days. The next post will tell you how to manage it for the long term. For more details, the guide at the end of this series has the exact roadmap to follow.
LEADERSHIP BUY-IN: Before kicking off the ninety-day plan, it’s essential that your senior leadership team prepares with this three-step process:
Senior leaders decide and commit: Before launching this ninety-day project, your entire senior leadership team needs to come to a consensus that this is one of the most important projects for the business this year. You’ll need to hold someone from the top leadership team accountable to fully own this project and follow through to ensure it gets completed by the next quarter (or ninety days). The CEO will need to sign off on this initiative before starting. Their buy-in and commitment is essential to the success of the project.
Project purpose statement: This team, the leaders at the top, need to get clear on why this is important and put together a purpose statement. Here’s an example: ”Documenting our processes is essential for us to stabilize and grow for this next phase so we can serve our clients better and ensure our team is performing at the highest level.” Write it down and add it to your project charter (or wherever you document your strategic plans and leadership commitments).
Announce the process documentation project: At your next quarterly team meeting, or however you communicate with all staff to prepare them for big initiatives like this, let them know that the company will be focusing on documenting processes this quarter. It’s not important to share the details company-wide yet, just let them know that you’ve prioritized this project for the quarter, that some people will be asked to be involved, and that it’s going to benefit the whole company’s mission. You can share your purpose statement and let them know that more information will follow.
Now, you’re ready to follow the plan to get your team organized, prepared, assigned, scheduled, and committed to process documentation.
The steps you’ll take to complete your process documentation are outlined below. The ninety-day guide with timelines and additional detail is provided at the end of this series.
Follow these guidelines for ninety days to complete your process documentation:
PROJECT PLAN: The purpose of the project plan is to determine exactly what resources are needed from start to finish in order to complete the project, and to manage those resources and the timelines. The project plan will be owned by someone on the leadership team who’s accountable for the project. Usually this will be the COO, VP of Operations, Operations Director, or the person accountable for overseeing the majority of the business workings. This person will own the entire project from start to finish but won’t need to be involved in every detail of the project plan. This senior leader will decide the 8–12 primary processes for the business, getting buy-in from the rest of the leadership team. For each primary process, a process owner will need to be defined. Which leader or person responsible for assuring process accuracy will oversee a primary process? It will usually be someone on the leadership team or a department head. References for these primary processes are provided in the guide at the end of this series. The project plan will need to include a housing location, like a Learning Management System (LMS), for the final documents. It will also include a timeline for full acceptance of the new process requirements, at which point each person working with that process will sign off on their adherence to it. Project plan details are outlined in the 90-day guide at the end of this series.
WORKING GROUPS: Working groups are assigned in order to get buy-in from all stakeholders involved in a process, including handoffs to other teams and processes. This ensures that any silos are broken down through properly communicating process requirements and will help prevent future silos from forming due to lack of transparency around a process. The senior leader accountable for the process documentation project will define the working groups for each primary business process. There will be eight to twelve groups, most likely consisting of many of the same people in each group. The working groups should be available for eight weeks for this project.
Each working group will include the senior leader accountable for this project (and/or the most visible senior leader for the majority of operations processes in the business) and the process owner (who is accountable for this process going right in the business). Generally, this is a supervisor of the department the process falls into or someone who is solely responsible for performing the process. Each group will also include subject matter experts (the people who know the most about the process — this may be the same person as the process owner). You’ll also want to include the people involved in handing off the process to the next business process (for instance, marketing hands off to sales) and the one after that (for example, sales generally hands off to an operations process). It’s great to also include anyone who is change resistant, meaning that they don’t think changing or documenting their way of doing things is necessary or that they sometimes push back on changes like this. Working groups will also need to appoint a scribe or someone that will be mapping and/or documenting the processes (this can be the process owner or process champion but not necessarily). Ideally, the scribe is a process-oriented person who generally understands the concept of process mapping, but this is not a requirement. We’re looking for progress, not perfection.
PROCESS MAPPING AND DOCUMENTATION: In the process mapping and documentation phase, each process’s working group will create a 1–2 page reference document (no more than 5 pages per process) that outlines the high-level steps to take in executing the business process effectively and efficiently. Although not necessarily responsible for mapping the process (which is done by the appointed scribe or documentation person), the process owner for each primary process will own the outcomes, meaning that they will need to be accountable for getting the documentation done, regardless of who is actually performing the task. To complete the process mapping and documentation, the working groups will meet for 90–120 minutes (depending on the intricacy of the process). Process owners will appoint the most qualified person to facilitate each meeting to get the process steps mapped. This can be the process champion, process owner, department lead, scribe, or someone from the leadership team that oversees that department. The process mapping will start by naming the person accountable for the process (the process owner). The scribe will map out the process (I’ll tell you how in the 90-day guide). The scribe will also document separately any discussion topics that come up in conversation that can’t be resolved in that meeting, along with any new ideas that are introduced. They will simply make a list of those without trying to solve anything. There will be an opportunity in the other phases to see if these ideas will work. The first round of documentation will be completed by Week 3 – The Testing Phase.
TESTING: The testing phase ensures that the documented process correctly captures the true process and allows for discussion with the team members who perform the functions day in and day out. The communication and practice here also creates buy-in from anyone who may not have been in the working groups. This gives them the opportunity to provide their input and also helps them understand process documentation and its purpose. That process team runs the testing process three times if possible, but at least once, to ensure the process steps are accurate. The process owner (or scribe) documents any missing steps and makes notes to bring to the working group for discussion and edits until the final testing stage is complete.
PROCESS EDITS: Following a testing round, the working group for each process meets with the process champion to discuss what they learned from the test and make edits to the process as needed. Then the scribe and process owner will update the documentation with edits prior to the next testing phase.
PROCESS OWNER SIGN-OFF: After the process has been tested, the process owner provides sign-off to confirm that the testing has been completed and that the process has been documented accurately and approved by the team responsible for executing it. This will kick off the training phase, ending in receiving a signature from all employees that they understand and will follow their processes for the betterment of the entire company.
TRAINING AND SIGN OFF BY ALL: During the training and sign-off phase, everyone has the chance to retrain on their respective primary processes and confirm they will follow them accurately moving forward. Each department lead or supervisor (usually the process owner) will conduct training and obtain signatures from all employees. In most cases, this can be done through the LMS software. Training continues as scheduled or until all employees have completed their training.
PROJECT WRAP-UP: The purpose of the project wrap-up is to conduct a postmortem of how the project plan was executed and what the team learned. This can be conducted in any capacity ranging from an entire team video call or in-person meeting, a survey, or simply collecting feedback and reporting findings to the senior leadership team. The point here is that you close out and wrap up the project and discuss key learnings that will help you improve these types of initiatives and celebrate your wins along the way. The process wrap-up is a good time to also kick off the next phase: process management.
PROCESS MANAGEMENT: Ongoing process management ensures that your process documentation remains an evergreen resource that is updated in real time as your business evolves and grows. In the next section, we’ll get into more detail about how to manage your processes. For now, it’s important to note that once you document, test, train, and receive agreement from the team that they’ll follow the process, the job doesn’t end there. Now, it’s time to let the processes manage the business.
Again, like any other critical business decision, execution of process documentation requires a commitment to proper planning, management, and follow through. A failed attempt at an initiative like this could do more harm than good to the organization and its culture. Using the above overview and the ninety-day guide will allow you to successfully complete Version One of your company’s process documentation while gaining buy-in from the whole team to commit to living in the land with process.
In the next section, we’ll discuss the management of this process documentation and how to ensure it remains a living resource that evolves and grows with the business.
Now, if you’re ready, off to the land of process management…