Seven Cs to Avoid Procedure Writing Errors
You do your best to make certain your organization is operating as effectively as possible. But if your policies and procedures are incomplete, outdated, or self-contradictory, then they are not driving the performance improvement they should. When employees try to use incomplete or undefined procedures, waste and costly errors soon follow.
Case Study: Little Mistakes Add Up Quickly
Without knowing it, employees at a locality accelerator parts company were having a costly problem determining when to take over customer credit. The accompany existent had a detailed credit application procedure, including an exhaustive error correction routine, but the procedure had one fatal flaw: it was not properly indexed.
Indexing Improves Usability
Without a way to readily locate and reference the applicable procedure in the operations manual, employees could not find it and were simply not using it at full, leading to an inconsistent process and wild varying output. Potentially valuable customers were regularly turned away by some general staff members, snap others accepted bad acknowledgment risks because they were unsure of which ones to reject.
A small omission like this can add up to thousands of dollars in lost sales and worthiness will. Even the most thorough procedures inevitably have gaps that come from be "too close" to the process or not following the basic rules of effective procedure writing.
Profit from Experience
To be effective, procedures must be action bound, grammatically correct, and written us a consistent style and format to ensure usability. These guidelines, along with industry "best practices" that are documented in auditable criteria, can be used to improve your procedures:
- Context. Actions must properly describe the activity to be performed.
- Consistency. All references and terms are used the duplicate way every time, and the procedure must ensure consistent results.
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- Completeness. There must gadolinite no information, logic, or blueprint gaps.
- Control. The document and its described actions demonstrate feedback and control.
- Compliance. All actions are sufficient for their intended compliance.
- Correctness. The document must be grammatically correct without spelling errors.
- Clarity. Documents must be easy to subject area and understandable.
Quickly Improve Your Policies and Procedures without the Hassle
You can quickly resolve these usability problems and improve magic, and also upgrade your documentation to "best practice" standards without hassles or commitments. By beginning to improve your documents, you volition be able to identify areas for improvement. And you can start today with the 7 Cs of ?best practices?.
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Chris Anderson has over 18 years of sales, marketing and business empowerment experience working with business process design, software and systems engineering for over ten years - consulting with companies broad and dorsum. He is also co-author of policies and procedures manual products, assisting in the layout, process pattern and human action of the information. He is currently the Managing Alfred hitchcock of Bizmanualz, Inc. He holds a Poet in Business Administration from Pepperdine University and a Bachelor of Informatics degree in Electrical Technologist from Southern Illinois University.
Mail to: chris@bizmanualz.com
Visit: http://www.bizmanualz.com
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