Avoiding shelfware

Documenting what you do - in the form of policies, business rules, process descriptions, procedures and work instructions - is basic to running a business. Basic quality assurance, process improvement and training of staff are made all the more difficult by the lack of formally expressed documentation. Major process changes - new computing systems, handling of new products - cannot happen without out it.

If you do not have a dedicated internal process-support capacity skilled in analysing your business and in producing and maintaining effective documentation, it is likely that the procedures you do have are:

• incomplete
• not current
• uneven in depth of coverage and assumptions of audience prior knowledge
• poorly organised
• underused.

But you know this - and documentation is not your core business. You attend to it as well as you can, either taxing your already over-burdened more capable staff to set down critical information in spare time they don't have, or tacitly expecting that individuals will document out of sheer self-interest to limit the pain. Until the business case for seeking outside help wins over, and you buy it in.

This short article considers what you need to commit to and ensure to obtain value from a purchase of procedures documentation from an external provider.

The story of business unit X

Business unit X carries out a central financial function. Over 30 permanent and casual employees work in teams in five major process areas. Staff turnover is fairly high. Five team leaders - leaders because they have stayed the distance required to acquire practical knowledge - direct the day-to-day work of teams whose makeup can be expected to change significantly from one six-month to another. Two key resources - long-serving "right-hand people" - actually know most of what goes on. But they are overloaded. They solve problems, fight fires and at the same time, attempt to complete their higher-level duties such as reviewing, reporting and authorising. New staff are 'mentored" by sitting along side old hands, and eventually replicate what they see and are told - for good or ill.

One day, a competent, professional technical writer is engaged and with consultation develops a comprehensive, well designed set of operational policies and procedures. They are published to the intranet and available on every desktop.

Now there is an effective training resource. Staff can be cross-skilled to cope with workload fluctuations and absences. New staff can quickly be brought up to speed on the correct way of doing things. Processes can be reviewed against a standard and improved. The seniors can get on with their own work.

The payoff has arrived. While it cost a lump, the writer seemed to manage the task of documenting the unit's activities without disrupting key people significantly. The review process was the only bottleneck, because it really ate up reviewers' time, and this blew out the budget, but in the end, a bright new formalised expression of this key business unit's activities was mounted on the intranet, to the unit's greater glory.

Problems over? Well, there'd be a fighting chance of that if the information contained in was effectively transmitted at the outset. Even though within a week portions of it may be out of date. And if the process of look, listen and learn mentoring continues unchanged…

The problems of obtaining effective value from formally documenting procedures are no different when outsourcing for them than when doing them internally- but the opportunities for success are greater in that you have a specialist information development resource to exploit when you outsource - and you should.

Two key elements of any documentation effort that is aimed at performance support that should be clearly specified up front are the take-up program and the maintenance program.

The take-up program

Effective initial take up is the first value point in any documentation exercise. Planning for it follows only from a detailed audience and task analysis. If your outsourcer stops at providing a list of documentation deliverables - and does not specify by what means the developed information is to be effectively taken up, and how this will be monitored and measured - then a critical success factor is being overlooked.

The table below lists some aspects of take-up you should ensure are well defined and to which you give your commitment.

The maintenance program

Any body of documentation that relates to dynamic subject matter - such as business procedures - is obviously at threat of decay in value if effective maintenance of the documentation is not maintained.

But it would be better, and realistic as well, to accept that the documentation you get - from any source, professional external provider or otherwise - will not be perfect. Hence thinking along the lines of "continuous improvement" will get you further than merely thinking of the need to maintain.

Documentation providers have had a long history of producing heavy volumes of "shelfware" in the procedures documentation department. Shelfware is still the most widely extant of documentation of this kind. So how can you keep it up date - or improve it - if it was produced by a specialist technical writer who has skills your people don't?

The maintenance program for the documentation needs to be formally specified, with the twin goals of currency and improvement spelt out. It needs to be tailored specifically to the resource levels you are willing to commit to keep it current and moving ahead. The organization must specify the expertise levels required to maintain it - and ensure these levels are funded in-house if the documentation is to be maintained in-house, or budgeted for if maintenance is to be contracted out.

The costs for both maintenance and take-up need to be accepted up front as part of the total cost - ignoring these factors will curtail the value of your documentation exercise to the point where you might have been better off not doing it.

Here is a checklist for taking over maintenance of externally produced procedure documentation in-house in a way that gives best value. The items in the list should form a requirements specification for the external provider to plan to, in consultation with your organisation, before the work starts.

• Specify/allocate the internal resources required for document maintenance post handover (name the people, estimate the costs)
• Specify the skills and expertise levels of those resources
• Specify the 'toolbox' required for the ongoing maintenance
• Include a set of detailed document maintenance procedures as a project deliverable
• Include a set of training resource materials for formal skills transfer at handover
• Specify the delivery of handover training as a project deliverable
• Specify additional training required (ie from third party training suppliers)
• Specify a formal maintenance / improvement review program post handover as a project deliverable

This article may be reproduced only with the permission of HCi (email HCi ). Copyright HCi, 2001-2.