How To Document Your Business Process With Ease

You don’t find a lot of small businesses documenting their processes.

This is simply because they don’t find any reason to.

In the early stages of a small business, when you have only a few employees, you can easily choose to ignore documenting your business processes and suffer no harm.

However, as your business grows, choosing to ignore process documentation will expose your business a myriad of problems.

What Is Business Process Documentation?

Business Process documentation is a detailed description of how to execute a process.

It requires detailed logging of every step, document, and resource used to accomplish a task.

Ultimately, the business process document should provide a detailed enough description of activities.

And resources to allow anyone without a prior idea of the business process to perform that process from beginning to end.

Why It Is Important To Document Business Your Process

Why should a small business owner care enough to document their business processes?

Well, here are a few things a growing small business would benefit from documenting their business processes:

1. Efficiency

The goal of process documentation is to improve process performance.

By documenting your business processes, your team can easily identify bottlenecks and areas of inefficiencies in specific business processes.

Which can be corrected to create a more efficient standardised process.

2. Knowledge Base

When a key employee leaves, many businesses suffer because it is likely they left with essential knowledge of processes valuable without transferring that knowledge to someone else.

This creates a vacuum that makes business processes break down and hard to fill after an employee’s exit.

Business process documentation makes this scenario less likely.

It also makes it easy to train new employees to carry out business processes.

3. Consistency

Business process documentation enables operational consistency.

As it relies on a formalised manual to carry out processes instead of relying on personal discretion and off-heart knowledge, that leads to inconsistency in process execution and final product.

4. Cost Reduction

From the three benefits discussed above, you can see the various cost savings a business can enjoy from business process documentation.

First through improved process performance, then through easier training for new employees, and then operational consistency.

With more process efficiency comes more results and lower prices. If you ask me, that’s a triple win.

5. Business Can Run Without You

Documenting your business processes is like a chef documenting his recipe.

It makes it possible for someone else to pick up the document and replicate the steps and achieve the same results.

This is an essential ingredient if you are building a business that runs without you.

Because it ensures that you no longer have the monopoly of knowledge required to run your processes and makes the business less dependent on you.

Now that we’ve discussed the benefits of business process documentation, let’s talk about how to document your business process.

Easy Steps to Document Your Business Process

Small businesses looking to document their processes can use these easy steps to get it done:

1. Identify & Name The Process – You begin your business process documentation by choosing a process to document. After you’ve identified a process, choose a name that appropriately describes that process (you can choose to name the process after you have defined the scope).

• Tip – It is tempting to want to start by documenting every process in your business but start with a simple process and choose a brief name that is specific enough to describe the chosen process.

2. Define The Scope – Process scope definition means that you have to outline the activities the process covers and what it does not cover. It is also essential that you define the beginning and end of the process, what triggers it to start and end, a description of the steps necessary to complete the process, the roles involved, etc.
3. Define The Resources – Various resources would be needed to implement your business process. What inputs are the inputs needed? Outline the inputs needed for your project, showing the distinct steps in your process where they would be needed. Also, describe the final product of this process. What would be the deliverable or deliverables at the end of the process?
4. Gather Process Information – In this step, the business needs to collect as much information as it can on the process from employees involved, subject experts, etc. Be sure to get your information from everyone involved in your chosen process. A few techniques you can use to get the information you need include direct observation, interviews, and questionnaires.
5. Organize Process Information – After you must have gathered sufficient information on the process, it is time to organize that information to create a process flow. This should be done in an easy to understand and sequential manner.

• Tip – outline the roles responsible for carrying out each task in a way that is easy for your audience to understand.

6. Visualize The Process – Visualizing your documented process in a flowchart makes it easier for new and existing employees to quickly grasp information on the flowchart.
7. Collect and Review Feedback – It may feel like your work is done, but we’ve only come have way. The next step involves sharing the business process document with stakeholders of the process and getting feedback on areas for improvement. Review the feedback and make necessary improvements.
8. Distribute – Without this step, your business would not fully achieve the benefits of documenting your business process. After you’ve reviewed your business process document and flowchart, the final step is to make it available to stakeholders.

• Tip –  Distribute the business process flowchart and documents in a way that is easily accessible to your stakeholders. We recommend using a digital distribution channel like Dropbox or Google Drive.

Lastly, always plan to review your business process to unlock more efficiency – this can be an annual process.

Tools For Business Process Documentation

There are a lot of tools that help make business process documentation even easier.

Apart from simple tools like Microsoft word or spreadsheet, many small business owners now use more advanced and dedicated tools to reduce the time spent documenting their business processes and make their documents visually appealing.

Popular among these tools include:

• LucidChart
• Microsoft Visio
• Canva
• Google Drawings

So, now that you know why you should absolutely document your business processes, and learnt how to do it with ease plus some tools you can use, what process in your business are you documenting first?

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