A crash course on process documentation (with step-by-step example)

It is widely known that Process is one of the three pillars, alongside People and Technology, that drive business growth. 

Despite this, up to 8 out of 10 business leaders we meet often fail to clearly define their processes, as they rely heavily on habits and intuition. Not until businesses face growth pressures will they realize how the lack of standardization can bring significant challenges. 

For many leaders like you, who are already busy seeking new revenue sources, the idea of documenting processes can seem daunting. 

This article aims to provide you with a brief, friendly guide on process documentation. Simple as it is, it surely can elevate your business to a whole new level.

What is a process? 

Every action within an organization forms part of a process, whether acknowledged or not.

Simply put, a process takes inputs and produces outputs through several stages, providing a high-level overview of how something gets done. 

What’s the difference between process and procedure? 

You may have heard of a familiar term called “Standard Operation Procedures”, or SOPs for short. So what is that about? 

Quick answer: SOPs are part of the process documentation. 

So for short, processes provide the framework, while procedures ensure that each step within the framework is executed correctly. You need both processes and procedures to make a detailed process document. 

When do we need process documentation?

During the early days of your business, you don’t usually think of documenting processes. But you should consider doing this when it comes to certain circumstances: 

• When you have a flock of new employees coming: You need to quickly provide a clear guide on how things are done.
• When you want to improve the quality of products and services: Quality cannot come without consistency and compliance with certain standards. 
• When you need to optimize your business: As our team at Rework always put it, it’s standardization before simplification. Defining your processes helps you to identify inefficiencies and areas for improvement.

What is in a process documentation?

To make it simple, this is an example of a basic process document for a Complaint Handling Process. 

Now, let’s go deeper into the steps to make this documentation. 

Step 1: Draft an Overview of the Process

A process overview includes: 

• Purpose: Why does this process exist? What problems can it solve? 
• Scope: When and where can the process be applied?
• Inputs: What is needed to start the process?
• Outputs: What does the process generate?

Step 2: Design the Key Steps

The next thing is to break down the process into manageable steps, each with a specific department in charge. 

Visual aids like flowcharts or diagrams can come in handy at this point.

Ensure steps are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, which means they don’t overlap with each other. 

Step 3: Detail on each step

This is the part where you define the procedures, as you go into detail about how each step is done. 

The basic procedure includes:

• Overall description of the step
• Stage Owner: The person overseeing the stage.
• Stage Workers: The individuals executing tasks in the stage.
• Duration: The time limit for completing the tasks.
• To-dos: Specific activities or actions to be performed within the stage.
• Input: Information or materials needed to finish the stage. 
• Output: The output or data generated after finishing the stage. Usually, the output of one stage will be the input for the next one. 

Put all the information together and now you have a handy process manual, ready to be applied to every situation. 

You can add other details like: 

• Revision history
• The standards or criteria to be met
• Safety and compliance requirements
• References to other related documents
• Glossary of undefined terms

Meanwhile, we think that a simple version like this is good enough to start. 

Process documentation best practices

Understanding how to make a process document is just the start. Here are the best practices to make sure the documentation comes to good use. We call it: The 3Cs requirements: 

• Clarity & Consistency: Make sure your documentation is easy to follow. Use simple language, avoid jargon, and maintain a uniform format and style.
• Continuous Improvement: Process documentation should not be a one-time effort. Regularly review and update your documents to reflect any changes in processes or regulations. Keep track of every time the process fails to deliver the expected output. 
• Compliance: The documentation is, after all, just a document. Perform regular internal audits to make sure people are doing it right. Establish reporting systems to track compliance-related metrics to identify and address issues promptly.

Transforming process documentation to daily operation with Rework.com

Maintaining the 3Cs is almost impossible without the help of Technology. Employees may struggle to understand and follow lengthy documents, and manual tracking is inefficient. 

Get to know Rework Flows - your Process Automation Tool, that helps: 

• Structure your process with pre-defined objects: 

To ensure clarity and consistency, we already define the fields as in a standard process document, and they are all customizable.  

• Streamline your process with automation rules: 

Rework helps you decide on reassignment rules so that the tasks will automatically be notified to the right people. This prevents human compliance errors and your employees will be able to onboard new processes in a minute. 

We also have an in-app automation board for you to easily set up any use cases you like without any coding required. In this example, once the team have received a customer feedback, you can set up to send a confirmation email to the customer. 

• Sustain your process with real-time data: 

These days, nothing goes well without data! Rework provides real-time data and analytics for you to track performance and identify bottlenecks, ensuring continuous improvement. And do I need to say the dashboards are customizable?

Final thoughts

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”. Process documentation is a way for you to communicate the standard across the organization, and it’s the starting point for every change. 

Companies don't usually talk about or have a "process strategy", but they should. Process excellence, which is the ability to improve processes continuously, is not a function or a responsibility of one team; it's an organizational capability driven from the top down and realized from the bottom up. Processes are the organization's circulatory system, and it's everyone's responsibility to drive process excellence.