By Serena Beck | Senior Member
This article offers you effective guidelines for improving your company’s internal procedures. The first procedure that I wrote for my company was during my interview. I was given a Star Trek calendar and told to write instructions for operating one of the ships. I am not a Trekkie and don’t know anything about Star Trek. However, I used creative license and wrote a procedure that included the basic elements. I am still working at the same company and write internal procedures and user guides for our clients.
Due to my lack of research and understanding, my procedure for operating the ship was not accurate. If I had been able to talk to the ship’s engineer, users, or Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who knew how to operate it, I would have had a better understanding of the ship. In order to edit or rewrite a procedure, you must first understand the process. Sometimes understanding the process can take a long time and may require several meetings with team members and procedure rewrites.
Plan and Organize
Establish or revise your documentation review and testing process before you edit any of your procedures. Once these procedures are finalized, review your existing procedures and create a schedule outlining the amount of work and time required to update your existing procedures. This will ensure you are set up for success before your project begins.
As you start to review your procedures, ensure they are consistent. Use templates to define the structure for each type of procedure. For example, all standard operating procedures (SOPs) may include a high-level summary flowchart. Flowcharts and other diagrams can help users see the big process picture.
Create an editing checklist or style guide to ensure that the procedures follow the same conventions no matter which team member is writing the procedure. If you are reviewing a large number of procedures at the same time, group them into related departments and review the grouped documents together.
SME Extraction
Talk to SMEs and users to better understand their processes. Ensure their procedures are still relevant and reflect how they do their jobs today. After I asked our SMEs how they completed tasks, I discovered that some of our procedures no longer reflected what we actually did. If procedures don’t accurately reflect a process, you risk receiving an audit finding. Once a discrepancy has been found in a procedure, it must be updated as soon as possible. An even bigger risk of an inaccurately documented procedure is if a team member doesn’t agree with or understand the process. She may create an “undocumented” procedure that only she follows. This could result in team members completing the same task in a slightly different ways.
Here are some sample SME procedure improvement questions:
- Do you still follow these steps?
- Is the information in the correct order?
- Could this be done in a more efficient way?
- Is the right amount of detail included?
- Could a new member of your team follow this procedure?
- Are there any prerequisites to this procedure? For example, knowing how to use a tool before following the procedure.
- Are the references accurate?
Compliance and References
Some companies may be audited by their clients or government agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). For example, a medical device company may be regulated by the FDA. Many procedures need to be in compliance with regulations and standards such as the Code of Federal Regulations 21, Part 820 Quality System Regulation or International Standard Organization (ISO) such as ISO 9000 or 13478.
While you are reviewing your procedures, ensure they are in compliance with applicable regulations and standards. Ensure that all internal and external references to other documents are accurate. Create and check a master cross reference list that lists all the documents and the references and keep it up to date.
The Minimalist Approach
New employees need a certain level of detail to complete tasks. However, too much detail can cause wordiness and confusion. You don’t want to document what users already know or what is obvious. You want to document difficult tasks or what the user doesn’t know. For example, if a user knows how to check a document in, don’t document the detailed check-in steps. Ask yourself if the information in the procedure adds value. If not, remove it.
Review your internal procedures for information that may often change. For example, don’t include version numbers in document titles. Rather than naming your document “Upload Process 1.7b,” name it “Upload Process.” Instead of including a hyperlink, include the website name.
Review and Training
When the procedures are reviewed, ensure that there is enough time for informal and formal reviews. Sometimes too many reviewers can pull your documents in many different directions. One writer or manager should be the decision maker and should have the final say on edits.
Once formal reviews are complete, make the documents effective but allow enough time for training on the procedures. Ensure that employees receive the appropriate level of training especially if the changes that were made are significant.
Audits
Once the procedures have been approved or finalized, don’t forget about them. Conduct quarterly reviews to ensure that they are still serving their purpose. If you know an audit is approaching, review, test, and implement your procedures well in advance. Keep a checklist of minor and major changes to make to the next release of the procedures. Once a year, conduct an internal audit to test your company’s procedures. Ask someone from another department or someone who is not familiar with the processes to test them.
Procedures are living documents. This may mean that some procedures live in a constant state of flux. However, once a procedure has had each piece of the process puzzle organized into logical steps, has been edited, tested, and finalized, it can rest (at least until the next review). Since our company started reviewing our processes on an annual basis and improved our procedure training, we’ve had fewer procedure related audit findings each year.
Serena Beck (Serenabeck.com) has been a technical writer for 10 years at Haemonetics Corporation, a blood management solutions company. In 2012, she received her CPTC. She lives in Victoria, BC, Canada, with her husband and two children. She enjoys traveling with her family and writing magazine articles.
What guidelines do you use to estimate the time needed for the various stages of this process?