A Complete Guide to Business Process Documentation with Examples

In that case, you’ll want to note which scenarios don’t require approval. You should also include the steps your team should take to address these exceptions. As you can see, each step has a corresponding input and output. Visualizing these steps in a flowchart makes it easy to see which resources and outcomes you can expect. You can also add swimlanes to your diagrams to categorize who is assigned to which tasks. Beyond keeping teams aligned, process documentation serves as a roadmap for team members which helps clarify the steps needed to create a new process.

• Or assign a process owner who can do regular reviews and notify others of the changes.
• Productivity should be the focus, not blind adherence to the tasks that must be accomplished.
• In some cases, there will be a dependency that must be completed for the process to begin.

It provides a foundation for employees to understand their job and train new team members. If you’re looking to provide a definitive creative or design guide for your team and vendor to follow, this template fits the bill. With this creative brief template, you can outline the purpose of your project as well as share the deliverables, timelines and challenges of your campaigns. This beautiful design process template is split into two sections.

Identify opportunities for continuous improvement.

The step-by-step guide helps you enhance your influencer marketing strategy, ensuring every activity is completed. Use it to seal influencer outreach plans and identify resources required to bring your plans to life. You can adapt this simple flowchart template to any process within your company. Here are some of the most common types of procedure documentation, including templates you can start using immediately. Once you have the information, connect with the business process consultants and the users.

Competing in the modern global marketplace, however, is a much more complex endeavor, requiring a strategic yet agile approach. Unique process maps can be used in business process modeling and notation. When you monitor your processes, you start to notice specific opportunities ripe for improvement while utilizing mapping to configure the activity flow.

Workflow and Business Process Software

New hires can quickly get up to speed following process documents. However, BPMN helps to align business processes with company objectives. BPMN also helps to determine and pinpoint essential activities required to complete every business task. Mapping these steps can create a more consistent business structure.

SignNow is an award-winning platform focusing on small outstanding checkses. It offers a very intuitive and user-friendly platform, fully-functioning Android and iOS apps, and multiple integrations with a custom API. Want to know more about how process management works in practice? Download our whitepaper ‘Starting your Business Process Management from Scratch’. Even if you want to get a new way of working, always start with the current situation. It is hard to improve if you don’t know what you are currently doing.

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While many processes will become static, the best business process documentation is always evolving and improving, so be sure to treat yours as the living document it is. How to write a process document, every companies’ needs are different. However, all business process documentation should be simple, functional, collaborative and accessible.

• When you hire new employees, you need a documented process to help them understand their role and how it fits within the overall organization.
• This easy guide to process documentation will help you do it just right.
• Schedule regular check-ins, even if they are only once a year.
• Their Digital Adoption Platform analyzes and automates processes, providing step-by-step guidance within each application.
• There is nothing better than relying on a standardized process and allowing employees to travel with more ease and confidence.

If the documentation is clear, the outside opinion will be able to complete the task and get the desired results – without needing to ask any questions. Every time you answer a question, add that answer into the documentation. Chances are good that someone else will have that same question! Wash and repeat until all the stakeholders can read through the documentation without posing any new questions.

Document both the starting and ending point of this business process. Many processes are repeatable and necessary for the functioning of a business. By writing down processes, you can reduce guesswork and make it easier for people to repeat vital processes. Process documentation outlines all of the actions needed to complete a task or carry out a process.

These tools offer a wide range of shapes, symbols, and templates, making it easy to create clear, concise, and professional-looking process diagrams. Visual representations can improve understanding, communication, and training, as they illustrate complex processes and relationships more effectively than text alone. A process document outlines the steps necessary to complete a task or process.

Ask your team to identify each step in the process, and put them in order. Setting your intentions and sharing those will keep your team on track. Monitor projects easily because you can identify exactly where you are in the process. Ensure knowledge stays within the business, even as employees come and go. If you skip ahead to documenting, chances are good you’ll capture the ideal process – not the process as it currently is.

Identify Process Inputs and Outputs

Define the results that confirm the process is completed successfully. Clear boundaries make it much easier to properly document, evaluate, and fine-tune all of your business processes. Process documentation helps companies identify what works in a given process, as well as potential bottlenecks and other issues. Over time, the documents can be refined to reflect adjustments made to the process to improve efficiency, speed, accuracy, etc. Ultimately, process documentation can increase efficiency and productivity both now and long into the future.

Review your process flowchart for errors, omissions, and clarity. Perform a “dry run” following the process as documented, review the results, and make any adjustments as necessary. By monitoring processes, you can identify specific areas for improvement while also mapping out the overall activity flow. It’s also possible to minimize unnecessary movement and to identify and eliminate duplicate tasks.

We’ll partner with you to create tailored plans and empower you to continually improve and govern with Quickbase. Capture how the effectiveness of the process will be measured. You might choose to use this section to be very specific and detail quantitative measures. Describe each of the activities of the process in narrative form. Guru integrates with Slack and MS Teams, which allows teams to quickly find relevant information from these apps. Smartdraw offers over 70 diagram templates to choose from.

The scope of the process document describes which process it will cover, the goals of documenting it, and how those goals help the organization. As organizations and projects scale, individual roles—and the knowledge that goes with them—become more siloed. An accounting team of one evolves into a dozen people handling payments, accounts receivable, and payroll separately. A succinct multimedia process document is a reusable asset that can train hundreds of new hires with a single time investment. It’s also an asset they can refer to repeatedly, leaving little room for interpretation via memory loss.

Along with setting expectations, process documentation is the best way to make sure your employees know how to do their job. Because you’re giving them explicit instructions on how to do their job the right way. Without process documentation, your company depends on specific people to run smoothly.

Your team members can focus on other things besides repeatedly teaching your processes to others. At the same time, the people being trained feel more confident and empowered when they can refer to documentation instead of asking someone else for help. Flowchart and diagramming tools like Lucidchart allow you to make visual representations of your processes that are easier for your employees to understand compared to just text. You can quickly visualize your team’s processes and break down complex ideas into a form that others can quickly understand. Get started straight away publishing your articles using Document360. When your documentation is published, your documentation tool should allow you to track the performance of your content.

The document should start with a home page giving a glimpse into the inside content. There should be a table of contents with broad topics and their sub-categories defined clearly. If appropriate, include a list of relevant business rules here and reference the steps from the activity description section in which they are enforced. Include a visual diagram of the workflow indicating the relationship between activities in the process. For example, before an offer can be made to a potential employee, the manager must have the appropriate budget allocated.

In a December 2017 report, Globalscape found that non-compliance cost companies over $14 million on average. Process documents ensure your company doesn’t face that unnecessary cost and support your compliance training strategy. We haven’t discussed the risks of process documentation yet, but there are a few common traps. Follow the steps yourself to see if you can complete the task.