Bendigo SEO and web development expert John Cullen, of http://purencool.digital, interviews David Stephensen of QDT Management Consultants about intranet-based procedure manuals and quality management systems.
http://purencool.digital/local-business-talks-digital-qdts-david-stephensen
My recent explorations have led me to a service called Simpleology. The site has tools for helping you to develop systems for your business and your life. It includes some clever and well-thought out self-discipline tools for achieving more. I particularly liked the Dreamcatcher, where you put all of the creative ideas that pop into your head when you are meant to be working.
One of my take-homes from the Simpleology experience is the four systems failure points that they see as most significant:
All of these problems are fixable:
At QDT we can help you with these things. To find out how, request a free consultation using this form.
Interestingly, Simpleology presents a lot of its material in the form of comics. I’ve been discovering that comics have an increasingly important place in professional development for younger people. There appears, for example, to be a serious Japanese manga (comic) for any human pursuit that you can name. I recently discovered a young winemaker avidly reading a manga dedicated to wine (Kami no Shizuku).
Checklists are probably the most powerful business system tool of all. You can use them:
In some businesses, such as a catering establishment, they make up most of the documented business system.
Truly effective checklists require careful design:
I have to mention one of the best books I have read on this topic, The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. This book tells how a team of medical professionals developed the WHO surgical safety checklist. The purpose of this project was to improve surgery success rates in developing countries, where surgery rates are increasing rapidly. The checklist has made a big difference in many of the countries that have adoped it. Below is an image of the checklist. For further information and any updates, the official home of the checklist is here: https://www.who.int/patientsafety/safesurgery/ss_checklist/en/
At QDT we can help you learn how to create great checklists. We can also create them for you if you are short of time. If you’d like to discuss how you can use checkists in your business, please contact us.
Would you like to add some graphics to your business documentation? You may want to add some meaning or just lighten it up. Just taking any graphic you want from the Internet can put you at risk of legal action. Fortunately, there are lots of free images available and Google gives you a way to find them. Follow these steps:
At QDT we have long experience in technical communication and can help design, project manage or write your product support information as well as your procedure manual. Please contact us for more information. We offer a free consultation if we believe that we can help.
Why would you want a procedure manual? Because you like folders on the shelf collecting dust? Because a business is meant to have one? Not good reasons. My answer is that your procedure manual is your training manual for team members. It is what cuts the cost of staff turnover.
People learn in different ways. I personally like to learn by reading. I think I’m in the minority. Most people seem to prefer videos. Therefore, for most people, an effective procedure manual needs videos.
Videos are more expensive than just writing the instructions, but, if that is what it takes for team members to be able to learn some things without someone showing them, then it may be worth the investment.
Videos are much cheaper than they used to be. For example you can use a slide presentation. Use office software to record voice with each slide, or video editing software like
Camtasia to record voice with the slides and make a video. For computer operations you can record yourself demonstrating something and use screen recording software to make the video. Here are some free screen recorders.
Sometimes you need a video of a person doing something. This needs a bit of planning and rehearsal, but it does not have to be an expensive professional job. You can do a pretty good job with a phone. It might need some editing but, when it’s done, that training video can be used many times. Good editing software makes it easy, and my favourite is
Camtasia. You can also edit on your device. Here are reviews of the available Android video editors and Mac video editors
Note: If you are making videos yourself, make sure you check that they clearly cover, explain and demonstrate the points you want to communicate. Get team members to review them and give feedback.
The next step is to create an intranet-based (internal website) procedure manual, aiming in the end for it to be a full guide to working in your business. Embed your videos in pages of the manual and include supporting text as required. This is where we come in. We can help you design your media-rich procedure manual. To find out more, request a free consultation using this form.
The stand-out new tool for me over the last couple of years is Evernote. It is a simple concept: a set of notebooks each containing a set of notes. The notes use a rich text format. In a note you can format the text, add links, embed picures, embed PDFs, link to other notes. The notebooks reside on your hard drive but are also synchronised to a cloud service. You can collaborate with others by sharing a notebook.
You can view any note or notebook on the Web using a link. A very impressive feature is that it searches all images for text, reads it and adds it to its search database. The picture below, shows notebooks, notes and a single note with an image with handwritten text. You can immediately find this text using Evernote Search.
For a small business, apart from its extreme usefulness as a super shared notebook, there is nothing to stop you using Evernote for a procedure manual. It does have some limitations, but they are not show-stoppers for the smaller business. We have been using Evernote for a while and already used it to create a reference library and a quality control manual for a client.
Did I mention that it is free software (with paid versions that are more feature-rich)? We have applied to become Evernote Certified Consultants. If you’d like to discuss how you can use Evenote in your business, please contact us.
This almost forgotten diagram shows the safest position for using a keyboard.
Also, for me, compared with the keyboard, it increases the risk of repetitive strain injury.
I’m saying ‘me’ here because I searched for evidence and found contradictions. It all seems obvious to me but I often share the minority view. I think the reality is that for frequently performed or repetitive actions the keyboard is better and for infrequently performed actions there are arguments on both sides.
Think for a moment. You have a keyboard at ergonomic height with a wrist rest. What muscles are you using to type? As far as I can determine in my own body, I’m using nothing above the elbow. How do you save a document? Press CTRL+S, using two fingers.
Let’s contrast this with the mouse. What muscles are you using? I regularly use muscles right up to my shoulder. How do you save a document? Using your arm you move the mouse to the Save icon. Then you use your wrist to finely position the mouse and a finger to do the click.
Which involves less physical work? Which is quicker? For me, the keyboard wins hands down (word play intended).
It may take some mental effort to memorise keystrokes for commands, but for frequently performed actions it will help you to work faster. Most good software has keyboard shortcuts. Why not invest some time in speeding up your work? Here are some collections of common keyboard shortcuts. There are lots. Don’t be overwhelmed. For a start, just pick a few for your most common simple operations. Learn more as you progress.
In the bad old days, the ISO 9001 Quality Management Systems standard was poorly understood and very labour-intensive. There was a lot of paperwork. Consultants would set up documents in folders. Management would laboriously drag them out, sometimes just before audit time. Few people really understood.
These days, consciousness and technology have caught up and the standard has also evolved. Records are easier to keep, and procedures easier to publish electronically. I believe that ideas like risk, the process view, customer focus and continual improvement are more widely understood. In the new 2015 version of the standard, management has to consider context and stakeholders and decide what quality management is appropriate. It does not spell out specific documented procedures, so lazy managers can no longer buy them off the shelf and pretend that they are in use.
For most businesses ISO 9001 certification does take some effort and expense, but brings benefits. We only work with clients who are serious about benefiting from the ISO 9001 journey as well as getting the certification. Most of them are already at least half way there. The goal of being certified to the standard motivates them to introduce the practices that they know they should have had anyway.
We pledge to our clients that we’ll help them make sure everything they introduce for ISO 9001 will make sense and benefit their business. For more about our approach to certification, see ISO 9001 (and other standards)— 7 steps or contact us.
A quiz question for you: What is the only internationally recognised colour sequence? The rainbow! How can we use this in information design? We can use it to illustrate a hierarchy or sequence.
For example, we can use it to indentify the document hierarchy levels in a procedure manual. Assign a rainbow colour to the level of each type of document. In our practice, we use red for the document type with the least detail, the policy or set of rules, and violet for the most detailed information level, the data collection form and the database.
Here is an example of some topics from a procedure, showing the colour coding
Do you have an important concept for your team or your clients to understand and you have to get it right? To discuss using colour sequences to get the message across, please contact us.
This is about the point, the unit of measure for font size. We talk about ’10 point’ or ’18 point’ type, but what exactly does this mean?
We measure font size as the distance between the bottom of the descender (for example, the bottom of the tail of a lower case ‘p’), and the top of the ascender (for example the top of a lower case ‘h’). The unit of measure is the point, which is 1/72 of an inch, or about 0.35 mm.
The world of fonts goes back a long way and these days is both and art and a science. For more information, start here in Wikipedia.
Can you be creative in something without putting your attention on it? I know I can’t.
We only have so many units of attention. If something outside is always claiming them then how can we have the space to be creative?
Left to my own devices I eat the same food and follow the same routine every day. My wife thinks I am boring or strange, or probably both. Why do I do it? Answer: To free my mind for creative thought!
A good business is a mixture of art and science. Creative thought is something a business owner needs time and space to do. If you have to keep on reinventing the wheel and keep being interrupted by team members who don’t know what to do, how can you work on growing the business?
A documented business system can free up your time for creative thought. Your team members will be happy, too, because they want to do their job, not be lining up for your help all the time!
For a free consultation about creating or improving your documented business system, complete and submit this form.
Somebody has given you a very big cookbook for Christmas. Your partner has requested gnocchi and pesto. How do you find the recipes?
If you are a navigator you’ll go to the table of contents, find the section on pasta, then gnocchi, and go to the recipe. Repeat for dips and pesto.
If you are a task focuser you’ll go to the index, find gnocchi and pesto alphabetically and go those pages. On a computer you’d use search.
If you are a story teller you might start at the italian dinner parties page and follow the references or links to the right recipes.
In every business you’ll find the navigator, the task focuser and the story teller. Your procedure manual needs to cater for all three. Good procedure manual software can look after these three people almost automatically. This diagram shows where our three different team members will look:
For more information about our intranet-based procedure manual system that automatically provides table of contents and search, please contact us.
This is my personal opinion of the best way to do tables. It goes against some traditions, mainly people’s desire to centre everything. Here is what I think:
Rhetoric is persuasive communication. Shouldn’t work instructions just contain the instructions? We argue that there is a place for persuasion.
Do your team members sometimes cut corners in their work? Of course they do. Why? Often it is because they don’t see the value in the step that they are skipping. You want team members who act intelligently. Well, they are doing that, saving themselves trouble and getting the job done faster for you!
Of course you put those details in for a reason, but the team may not understand that reason. Adding a persuasive element to your work instructions can motivate team members and help them understand about the details.
There are four types of persuasive instruction writing you can use:
Look at the instructions you write for team members and see if some persuasion would make the instructions more effective.
If you have challenges with team members complying with instructions, get in contact with us.
The management standards like ISO 9001 refer to ‘corrective action’, but what does it mean? It is more than just correcting something. You don’t want the problem to happen again, do you?
Here are the steps to follow:
To illustrate, here is a story about how we dealt with the mice in our kitchen:
The ‘Rolls Royce’ of corrective action systems (well, the Ford Motor Company’s system, actually) is the 8 Disciplines (8D). You can read about it here.
Things that go wrong can be costly, so make sure you get the the bottom of the problem. We have a system that uses free software to track your issues and tasks.
If you’d like to discuss your issue and task management please contact us.
Most of my Word tips focus on persuading people to use the keyboard instead of the mouse, because it is quicker and there is less repetitive strain. Today I couldn’t resist throwing in a mouse one. Here are your tips. To:
In this issue:
Can your business operate without you? Can team members find the instructions for every task? When you write down how your business works:
Here is what the home page of your procedure manual could look like:
When you hear the term ‘procedure manual’, what do you think of? A folder full of hard-to-read text that a consultant has written, describing something that may or may not be what happens in your business?
Well, if you are not near a computer then it is good to have printed instructions in a folder. By the time you keep it up to date, however, it is an expensive way to go.
Here is another way to document your business:
Products like PolicyGuides make it easy to do this and we can set it up for you and teach you the skills you need. For more information please contact us. go to top
Say that you manage tasks for team members using a calendar or other task management software and that you have an intranet procedure manual. When you assign a task to a team member, include a hyperlink to the task instructions. When team members view the task assignment they can follow the link to view the instructions.
If the system you use is responsive (displays well on mobile devices), team members can display the checklist on their phones.
If you normally use select, cut and paste, try this:
To move a paragraph up or down (change the order of paragraphs):
Here is an example:
You can use the same keystrokes to move a table row up or down.
Note: If you have a table cell containing several paragraphs and you use those keystrokes, Word will move the table row up and down, not the paragraphs.
Here is a great resource of tips for using Microsoft® Word: http://wordribbon.tips.net
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At QDT we LOVE procedure manuals and quality systems, and we make them easy to read and to use. We can take charge of your project or just be designers and mentors for you and your team. For a free consultation (conditions apply), please contact us. or complete and submit this form.
David Stephensen
QDT Management consultants
Putting you in control of your business
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It’s been a while since we wrote an entry in our blog. We are starting back with bite-sized tips to help you with documenting your business system. We know you are busy, so we are aiming to give you just enough to digest quickly. We’d love to hear your feedback, including requests for topics.
To change the case of selected text, use SHIFT+F3. Each time you press it , the selected text rotates through ALL CAPITALS to all lower case to Initial Capitals. You can also do this with the current word. Just place the insertion point in the word and use SHIFT+F3 to rotate through the cases.
Should we ban the word should? Nothing annoys me like the word ‘should’ in work instructions. Should means that you don’t have to do something, or that you hope something will happen. There is normally no place for this word in a work instruction. A work instruction is a list of commands to carry out a sequence of actions. People are tempted to use should when they write the work instruction as a narrative instead of as commands. The use of narrative and the word should can make the reader uncertain. When you write work instructions, use commands, not narrative. Here is an example:
Narrative mixed with commands  (Creates doubt in the reader’s mind) |
Commands (Best practice) |
Making tea
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Making tea
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When we are analysing a business we normally come up with nine main business areas. There are some overlaps, but the majority of procedures reside in one only of these areas. They also reflect a typical division of managers in a larger business. This could be a way for you to divide up your procedure manual.
10 Management, communication and culture
20 Site and infrastructure—including office services, records, maintenance
30 Marketing—capturing leads
40 Sales—converting leads into customers
50 Operations—what your business actually does
60 Purchasing—including inventory
70 Finance
80 Human resources
90 Safety and environment
How many times have I struggled through a supposed procedure manual or safety manual and found that it was just a collection of lists, not a set of instructions for people to follow? Too often, sadly.
Many quality manuals and safety manuals available off the shelf, information provided by government agencies and, of course, the standards themselves, ISO 9001, AS 4801, AS 14000, are not procedure manuals. They are guidelines for writing procedure manuals. How many businesses have a copy of one of these documents and claim to have a procedure or safety manual? Too many!
A simple test: Show the so-called procedure manual to a team member and ask them to explain what actions they have to carry out. If they have to search through pages looking for mention of their roles and piece it together like a jigsaw puzzle, then it is a set of lists, not a procedure manual.
A good procedure manual provides instructions for the tasks that team members have to carry out. The topics are arranged in a natural way that fits the thinking of the team members who use it and is easy for them to find. Apart from underlying knowledge and training general to your business, everything the team members need is in the work instructions or the work instructions show how to find it.
There is no escaping some work in creating this step by step material. It is often better for the business owner not to do this work. The best people to create it are the people doing the job, or at least the supervisors. You can help and ensure that the manual is correct by:
Background rules and standard work instructions have an important place in the manual, as long as they are only supporting and not replacing the instructions for the flow of the business. For example, if you have a restaurant, you may have a primary work instructions and checklist for setting up a wedding. Supporting this is (for example) your standard work instruction for carrying tables, which has been through a risk assessment. You have previously trained your team members in it and they have acknowledged in writing that they received the training. Also supporting it is your general checklist for table setup that covers all occasions.
You want your team members to be able to find instructions quickly. This means some careful designing of how the topics in your procedures manual fit together. The way you organise your topics should tell the story of the flow of activity in your business, but this should not be the only way team members can find information. A good on-line manual has several navigation methods. We’ll write a separate blog about this soon.
If we write your manual for you, we can almost guarantee that your team will not read it. What would we know of the details of their skilled work? Our worst nightmare is the dusty black folder on the shelf on which you spent thousands of dollars and nobody reads. We don’t want that money! It is better and cheaper to hire us to design your manual and teach you how to write it and manage it.
Some people make hard work of their business documents and others make easy work. What is the difference? Well there are lots of ways of making less work but in this article I’ll talk about stylesheets.
People who use stylesheets spend very little time formatting their documents. It all happens automatically and can be uniformly changed in an instant.
People who don’t use stylesheets have to make sure all text looks right by using word processor controls or copying formats from place to place. If they want to change the appearance of their document, they have reformat it all by hand.
You want the text in your business document to look different in different places. For example, you want to have ordinary text, headings, bulleted and numbered lists and emphasised words. We’ve made a list of the different appearances that the average business document needs:
In a word processor or website editor we create a label representing each kind of text. We tell the software what we want text to look like with each label. Then we simply attach the correct label to each block of text and the software does the rest. If we don’t like something about the appearance of a label, we tell the software to change it and the whole document instantly changes. Our set of labels and the appearances we have chosen is called a stylesheet.
Here are some examples showing the same document with different styles. It takes only a few minutes to change the styles, even for a 500 page document! Click the images to view PDFs of the documents in new tabs or windows.
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Once we have defined our stylesheet we train our team to use it and insist that they do so. With this small effort we have raised productivity, since nobody is spending time formatting documents by hand! Once you start using them you will never want to go back to formatting by hand.
This article is about uniformity in your procedure manual, but stylesheets can bring value to other documents, even letters. Hopefully your webmaster is already using a system called cascading stylesheets (CSS) on your website. If not then you may need another webmaster.
The popular word processors such as Microsoft Word and Open Office Writer have well developed stylesheet features. In word processors a label is called a Style and a stylesheet is called a Template. All you need to do is invest some time in learning how to use this feature, develop some templates for your business and train your team to use them. If you are writing a procedure manual or any long document it will remove an enormous amount of frustration. It is worth the effort!
Both Word processors have ready made styles that you can just start using. Look for the Heading, List number, List Bullet, List Continue styles. This is only a start for casual work. For best results you need to take control and make a proper template.
The software that we recommend for procedures manuals, Way We Do and Confluence, both have good stylesheet systems.
If this seems a little tricky for you, affordable help is at hand. You could hire a consultant to create templates for you and train you and your team to use them. You may find someone local or we can help you. Just give us a call or send an email.
A procedure manual is a big job. After you become embroiled it you are going to be delighted with anything that will make it easier. A stylesheet will take a big weight off your shoulders.
If you find this blog useful, please leave us a comment. If you are reading this in an email, you’ll have to go to the blog site to leave the comment.
