Writing on Process, Documentation and Training
Notes on process development, documentation and the parts of operational improvement that tend to get skipped. Written for people running the work, not for people commissioning frameworks.
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How to Map a Business Process
A practical method for current-state mapping: how to set the boundaries of one process, interview the people who do the work, the six things to capture at every step, why swimlanes earn their effort, and the four places it usually goes wrong.
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How to Write an SOP People Will Actually Use
Most procedures fail for reasons that have nothing to do with writing ability. What to establish before writing a word, the seven sections a usable procedure needs, how long is too long, and why consistency across documents beats polish within one.
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How to Run a Training Needs Analysis
Define requirements as tasks rather than topics, establish current capability from more than one direction, and classify every gap before choosing a remedy - because a tooling gap and a knowledge gap look identical and need opposite responses.
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Building Training From Your Procedures
Curriculum before materials, a learning path rather than a course, choosing the medium after the need instead of before it, and why the humble one-page job aid gets used more than everything else you produce combined.
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Why Process Changes Don’t Stick
Resistance is usually information you failed to collect. On finding the stakeholders two steps downstream, briefing supervisors first, naming an owner, and the post-implementation check that almost every program skips.
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Customer Journey Mapping vs Process Mapping
Two views of the same thing, usually run apart. Customers do not experience your org chart, they experience your handoffs - and laid side by side, a complaint stops being a mood and becomes a step with an owner.
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What Your Numbers Say About Your Processes
Where margin actually sits versus where you think it does, the five operational costs that have no line item anywhere, two tests worth running on any management report, and how to trace a number back to the step that produced it.
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Why Process Development Matters, and Why Most of It Starts in the Wrong Place
Process development is nearly always sold as designing better processes. The more useful work, and the work almost nobody does first, is establishing what your processes currently are. On the statistics you should not trust and the order the work should go in.
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Process work is the whole of what we do, not a practice area.
We document how organizations actually operate, identify where that is costing time and money, and build the training and documentation people will use. If something here describes a problem you recognize, the conversation is free and we will tell you honestly whether it is the right kind of problem for us.