Procedures Manual

Every company must have processes and procedures. These can either be left to random for each employee to figure out for themselves, or rigidly documented in some TQM manual.

The case of the former is self evidently inefficient and in the worst case can lead to a total breakdown of the basic functions of the company. Yet for a small company, with people mostly competent at their jobs, it will often be the most effective method since each individual has the total freedom to evolve a system best suited to their particular work method.

The case of the latter looks very attractive to larger organizations where one or more layers of management can give them selves the comfort, false or otherwise, that the business is being controlled by the fact a documented set of procedures exists. The reality of course is the procedures manual, if used at all, at best reflects the 'ideal' process as conceived by the author and only has some chance of resembling the actual process used in the work place.

Small businesses, by the fact of their continued survival, will tend to look after themselves as far as procedures are concerned, and since the principle stake holder(s) are, or should be, closely involved in the day to day running of the business, processes tend to resolve themselves in the natural work flow of the business. So we need concern ourselves no further with this case.

These are the observable facts regarding documented procedures:

a) They are most accurate to the person writing it, at the time of writing, immediately from which time the accuracy begins to diminish

b) To carry any value forward from the time of writing, must be upgraded constantly

c) A process is of no value in isolation, integration with other processes must also be maintained

d) Cross referencing of processes will grow at the square, or some higher exponent of the number of processes

Which inevitably leads to one of several things:

a) Unmaintained process documentation steadily losing relevance until worthless

b) Time, otherwise needed to actually do the job, must be spent by each person to keep the process documentation up to date, requiring additional people for each function or,

c) Establishment of a person, group or department solely to keep documentation up to date, in which case

d) Since the person writing the process is no longer the person doing the process, the relevance of the documentation is far less

e) At some point, the process documentation task will grow to a cost beyond the reasonable, perceived, return of all but the most bureaucratically minded person

At some point, hopefully sooner, but all to often far, far later someone will say "What is the point?", and if they then have the will and the authority to pursue that question, will find none.

Therefore the organization, having undergone the very expensive, very time consuming process documentation exercise, finds at the very best they have ended up with a rough guide to how things could be done, the relevance of which would not exceed the value of five bullet points jotted down by each employee in ten minutes during their morning coffee break.

http://steve.blogs.exetel.com.au/

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