Procedures Manuals

Organise your procedures into a well structured procedures manual. Make it easy for people to find the established, accepted and approved way to achieve things.

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Controlled Access

Make your procedures available to those that need them, and only those that need them.

Easy To Find

Make life easier for your team, let them find the procedures they need when they need them.

Easy To Manage

Ensure procedures are kept current, regularly reviewed, used and improved.

What is A Procedure?

Exactly what is a procedure?

A procedure can be defined as ‘a series of actions that are done in a certain way or certain order, an established or accepted way of doing something’.

That’s an interesting definition. ‘An established or accepted way of doing something’. That could be a formal document that describes what that way of doing something might be, or it could be a less formal verbally communicated description between two or more people, distributed by word of mouth, or even a mixture of both. We could be using flowcharts, diagrams and the written word to record a specific procedure, there are many options.

Procedures in Business

If you operate any kind of business, procedures are a vital component of what you do each and every day. They may not be formal, but they exist. They may or may not be the best way of doing things, but if they are the accepted or established way, then that’s how they will continue to be done, until someone notices a safer, better or quicker way to get that thing done. Even then they need to communicate that change to everyone involved in carrying out that specific procedure, so any benefits are widespread.

If you consider the phrase ‘until someone notices a better, safer or quicker way’, then you might also infer that having procedures in place allows a person to examine the way things are done currently, and if they have a controlled way to suggest changes to those procedures, propose those changes for consideration such that a procedure improves over time.

You could also infer that procedures enable a level of consistency. If you have employees dealing with customer complaints, then it’s far easier to ensure all customers get the same experience when employees are following a customer complaints procedure.

In some businesses, particularly those operating in heavily regulated sectors such as aviation, aerospace, healthcare and many more, having formal procedures is not simply beneficial, it’s a regulatory requirement and part of how those organisations are able to demonstrate compliance with regulation or legislation.

Benefits of formal procedures

There are clear benefits to having formal procedures in place. Some of these are:-

The accepted or established way to achieve something is documented as a procedure. It becomes possible to check that this procedure has or has not been adhered to.
New employees can determine the accepted way to do something by reading the latest procedure
Anyone moving internally within the business can understand the way things should be done when they assume a new role or take on a new task for which a procedure exists.
Anyone looking to improve the way something is done, has a starting point to work from. This could be an analyst examining why things are done a certain way, or a software developer looking to automate some aspect of a procedure.
Business continuity can be aided, people responsible for steps in a given procedure can be identified, and if they leave or are unavailable, you can easily identify what is required to replace them.
Third parties (other businesses, regulators, auditors) can check that the formal documented procedure is being carried out in a compliant way (that is not deviating from what is documented and expected).
A procedure, and adherence to it, can be used to demonstrate compliance with legal, regulatory or quality frameworks.
Consistency, the same thing done the same way all the time, no room for variation. If you want all your customers or employees to get a uniform experience when communicating with your business, procedures can be one way to achieve that.

There are of course others.

Simply having an established or defacto way of doing something, isn’t enough. Sometimes, events conspire in such a way that leads to a catastrophe. How often have you heard the conclusion of an inquest or investigation make the statement ‘lessons have been learned; procedures have been changed?’

Lessons Learned Procedures Changed

Poor Procedure

This is typically where formal procedures are in place, yet still those procedures have been found to be lacking in some critical detail or step, or maybe they were ambiguous in some way.

The procedure was carried out but was lacking in some regard, it was inefficient, dangerous, or worse could result in a serious incident of some kind.

Inadequate Procedure

In other cases, formal procedures are not in place and so there’s no concrete record of what steps should have taken place other than a statement from someone saying, “well this is how we always do it”. Effectively, no procedure existed, at least not in the formal sense, there was no stated way things should be done.

Inaccurate or outdated procedure

In other cases, the procedure could well have been followed to the letter, but the person was following the wrong, or worse still, an outdated procedure. Perhaps they didn’t know a procedure had been updated or had used a copy they obtained a while ago. An uncontrolled copy in other words.

Procedures Not Followed

Sometimes procedures simply aren’t followed. There are many reasons for this, maybe they were accessible, but it was simply too much trouble to go and get a copy, operational pressures may have been considerable at the time. It happens.

Looking at the benefits of formal procedures we list, we can see that having procedures in place is something that brings great benefits to any business, but is it enough? Not really, there are lots of other considerations. We can see there is a need for procedures to be accessible, so that people might find what they are looking for. This involves organisation of procedures into related areas, storage in a convenient location, and in some cases, controlled access to those procedures.

We can see there is a need for change control, so we can control how a procedure changes, when a procedure changes, and how that updated procedure should be communicated both within and outside the organisation.

To do that we can organise our procedures into one or more procedures manual.

What is A Procedures Manual?

Common Procedures

In simple terms, a procedures manual is a collection of documents that together form the accepted or established way of doing things within a given organisation.

It follows that as an organisation becomes larger, it becomes typically more complex, with more departments, and more procedures are created; the need for new procedures increases. There is a need to add procedures in a controlled way.

There may be a Finance Procedures Manual, HR Procedures Manual, Engineering Procedures Manual, IT Procedures Manual, Customer Complaints Procedures Manual, the list goes on. It might be that employees in one area of the business don’t need to know about procedures from another, or maybe a much smaller limited set. Does the Call Centre need to know about, or see, the Finance Procedures? Probably not.

Varied need for control

Whilst they all refer to the expected or established way to do a particular task, they may have slightly different regulatory frameworks associated with them (or none at all), some procedures may directly relate to legislation or regulation, some are purely internal procedures.

Within every business and the individual areas of every business there are likely to be many individual procedures, some of which relate or depend on each other, some that quite happily sit on their own.

Organising A Manual

There are of course lots of ways to organise this, you could have a monolithic paper book, or a set of loose documents collected together in a folder. You may have electronic files scattered across shared folders and drives on your network or local devices. You could have electronic files organised into one central folder, or a mix of all of the above.

Make procedures easy to find

Wouldn’t it be better to organise all of these procedures manuals into one convenient online location, with granular access controls, in a way that fits your organisation by creating a structure that reflects your organisation, making things easy to locate? With our company manual document control and information system, you can take control of your procedures manuals, empower employees and partners to easily find, use and improve those procedures. Keep everyone informed, all of the time.

Introducing new procedures

Adding to the Procedures manual

The time has come when a member of the team has identified the need for a new procedure, this could be because of expansion or it could be because of external factors, like a change in legislation or taxation. There are many reasons. In all cases there are a few things that need to be checked.

Is there already an existing procedure? How might we determine this? Well that really depends on where your procedures are held. If they are on paper and held in a manual in an office, then it might be a case of consulting that manual and checking something covering the steps within the new procedure already exists. This might take a bit of time.

Are the procedures stored on a hard drive or file share on the network? Ok, it’s possible to scan the directory looking for documents that match what’s proposed for addition, but we might need to open multiple documents in turn to ensure what we are about to introduce isn’t already covered elsewhere. If the folder is organised, the task might be a little easier, e.g., all finance procedures are in a finance folder.

If we get that far, we can then go about proposing our change, how do we do that, email a few people? Fill out a paper change control form and wander around the business trying to obtain input? How do we ensure our change doesn’t negatively impact another area?

How we help

With the company manual document management solution, you can search for key words or terms related to your proposed change and the contents of everything in your manual will be checked. Any matches will be displayed on screen. Identifying if anything else already exists, which is straightforward and quick.

We index all documents, so the text within is fully searchable.

Our software allows you to create a hierarchical structure, an information taxonomy, that fits your organisation like a glove, this makes it easy for anyone to know where to look. The structure is also fully searchable. This can be as simple or as complex as needed, whatever suits your organisation.

We offer an entirely online change control process. Anyone wanting to propose an addition, update or change can do so online, subject to approvals defined in the system, by other system users, with a full record of all changes, all proposed changes are recorded, even those that are rejected.

Updating Procedures Manuals

An existing procedure needs to be updated, this could be because of a quality finding, regulatory change, or just a simple improvement, or perhaps as a result of a periodic review. The same problems that exist when adding a new procedure also exist when the time comes to update a procedure.

How Does The Company Manual Software Help Control Updates To Existing Procedures?

The company manual makes it easy to propose a change. This can all be done online, we create an online change control request, attach our draft document and submit the request. The system knows if another change for the selected document is pending and will let us know.

At the time of proposing a change, we can specify other options including requesting read and sign. The actual approval model is configurable, but in a nutshell, people defined as having an interest or ownership in the document are notified about and can review and approve or reject the change. Optionally, the change may then go to a quality assurance group for final approval.

At all times the proposer can see the status of their change request, and approvers can see the status of the approval flow, including comments gathered as part of the approval or rejection process.

Procedures have changed, who needs to know?

It’s one thing to change procedures, it’s another to notify people and inform them that those procedures have changed. It’s important to communicate when procedures change, and also why they change.

With the company manual document management and information system, all recent updates are visible when a user logs into the system. They can see the documents that have been updated, when they were updated, why they were updated, and the full change history of that document. The system will also on an ad hoc or scheduled basis send digest emails about updated documents. Users always get the latest version of every document.

If the nature of a change is particularly important, then read and sign can be used for a formal acknowledgement of receipt and understanding.

Keeping procedures manuals current

Ensure procedures are reviewed

Things change all the time. Some changes are seismic and notifiable, your organisation will be notified of such changes and can respond to that notification.

For obvious changes, specifically those that relate to legislation or regulation, the company manual offers metadata linking, this allows identification of those procedures that might need to be changed as a result of regulation or legislative change.

Other changes are slower and not so obvious.

For that reason, it’s good practice to periodically review your procedures, and if necessary, raise a change control request.

The company manual document management software allows you to control procedure reviews with ease.

Procedures can be assigned owners, and those owners take on a responsibility for review. With the company manual you can determine how often a review should be performed, monitor whether those reviews are being completed, if they are being completed on time, and report on the number of reviews and reviews becoming due.

When a procedure owner uses the system, they can see all of their procedures, how long to go until a review is due, and the system will highlight procedures due for a review in the immediate future, making that call to review a little clearer and less likely to be missed.

This allows to you to ensure all documentation in your procedures manual are periodically reviewed, and those reviews are recorded. In other words, management of procedure reviews becomes simple and convenient.

Are Procedures being used/Followed

We can have a comprehensive set of procedures in place for all areas of a business or organisation, we can ensure we provide easy, convenient access to those procedures manuals, making it easy for employees and partners to find what they are looking for. However, do we know the procedures are being consulted regularly? Can we determine how many people in our organisation are actually consulting them and when? Perhaps we have a procedure that is consulted frequently, or not at all. If you can’t answer this question, then you can’t be sure why that might be. That could be an opportunity to avoid a quality drop off, or remove an obsolete procedure.

Understand Engagement

The company manual document management and information system will show how often procedures are consulted, when they are consulted and by whom. It’s easy then to determine how well engaged employees, contractors or partners are with the procedures manual and identify areas for improvement.