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
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:
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.
In this article I’ll describe some options for keeping track of business issues or tasks so that you and your team don’t forget them.
In a systemised business, if an issue arises, you don’t want it to be forgotten before you resolve it. You may need to manage safety issues, customer complaints, corrective actions, system improvements, quality management issues or just action lists for your team members. You need a system for issue management. In this article we’ll discuss some options.
To track issues, you need to have a way of
We describe here three technology levels for your issues: (1) paper or whiteboard (2) document and (3) bug tracker. Your choice depends on the number of issues and the complexity of your business, not on how clever you are about technology. You’ll be cleverest if you select the level appropriate for your business needs. It could be that you have a high tech business and you find that a whiteboard is best.
Here is a simple set of stages (statuses) for issues.
| Status | Description |
|---|---|
| New | Reporter has entered the issue or task. |
| Assigned | Reporter (or the issue tracker, automatically) has assigned the issue or task to the Problem Solver. |
| Resolved | Problem Solver has resolved the issue or task. |
| Closed | Reporter has reviewed the resolution and closed the issue or task |
| Reopened | The issue or task was resolved or closed, but someone has reopened it. |
Tips:
Manage your issues in a spreadsheet or in a table in a document:
Spreadsheet tips:
Software developers have created a variety of issue management programs for their own use. Many of these are free open source software. While these are all intended for the software development environment, if you spend a short time configuring one, it works well for managing business issues. We are successfully using the popular free Mantis Bug Tracker (http://www.mantisbt.org/). The diagram at the top of this article shows the workflow that we configured for a quality management system improvement suggestions database.
Once you move up to bug tracker software, you may find yourself using it for all kinds of action lists.
Contact us to order our low-cost report that explains how to configure Mantis for business systems. We charge a small fee for our report, but please remember that the software itself is free.
In this article we explain why it is better to organise your procedure manual so that it suits your team, not so that it suits your auditor.
Just because you are getting ISO9001 certification does not mean that the table of contents of your procedures manual has to follow the clauses of ISO9001. Your procedures manual needs a table of contents that fits your business.
Don’t worry about the auditors. They don’t need to be spoon-fed your ISO 9001 compliance. Your procedures manual is for your team, not for the auditor! The auditor knows ISO9001 back to front and can easily assess whether your procedures manual is compliant.
You can think of your business as a hierarchy or as a process. Which is better to dominate your procedures manual? Since procedures are action, then the process view is surely better. isn’t it?
If you take the process view, you can think of your business like a play. The play has a script. It is divided into acts and scenes. Think of each act as a different area of your business. There is the Sales act, the Marketing act, the Human Resources Management act and so on.
Each act has a number of scenes. In the Sales act, there is the scene where people close a sale, another where they have a meeting to review sales performance and another where they deal with customer follow up, feedback and issues.
In a scene, which we like to call a Procedure, the team members involved have different Roles and communicate with each other to achieve the purpose of the scene. We call what each Role does an Activity.
In our opinion, the best and most organic table of contents for a procedures manual is the acts and scenes (business areas and procedures) that make up the business.
Now there may be a lot involved in a procedure. In the play analogy, it could be that a Role has a particularly long speech to make. Instead of including the whole speech in the scene, we include it as a support document. We call this a Work Instruction.
So a play has acts, scenes and speeches, and your business has business areas, procedures and work instructions.
We can help you think through the acts, scenes and speeches of your business and guide you through creating your procedures manual, whether or not you are going for ISO 9001 certification.
We help to make management easy. Contact us.
