Making written procedures work

by Onno van Ewyk

Many procedure manuals are large multi-volume works, the initial drafting of which involved many person.months of work. And yet the work has been completely wasted, because they are never used.

How can an organisation make written procedures effective?

There are a number of hurdles to be overcome, and most of them stand at the point at which the documents are being written.

There has been a lot of work in the past few years on the use of Plain English, an approach to document writing which strives for clarity by, for example, not using a long word where a short word will do. In Australia, a long-time proponent of this approach is Robert Eagleson (see reading list below).

But turgid English is only one of the reasons why procedures fall into disuse. Another is the way the documents are structured. The technical documentation industry (which writes user manuals) has over the past twenty years developed approaches to document structure which have much to offer in procedure document design. One approach is 'audience and task analysis', which starts with the premise that the document must match the needs of the reader. So for example, procedures which are used by a particular person should be grouped into a volume for that person's use, rather than lumped into a larger volume covering the whole department.

Page layout and typography can also be a contributing factor to a document's disuse. Another Australian researcher, Colin Whealdon, has carried out important work on the effect on readability of various typefaces.

The international quality assurance standard series ISO 9000 sets a number of 'document control' requirements for the management of important procedures within an organisation.

The standard requires that new documents and changes to existing documents should be reviewed prior to issue, and that proof of this review be kept. As a result of this, many procedure documents carry at the head or foot of each page a box containing an authorising signature. The standard does not state that this is required: in fact, this heavy-handed approach to proving a document's authenticity reduces the document's usefulness by making it harder to update and taking up space. There is no need to carry a signature on each page, only to have some form of proof (eg a signed form) that this version of the document has been authorised.

The ISO 9000 standards also require that only up to date copies of documents should be used in the workplace. Although this requirement sounds straightforward, its formal implementation is fraught with problems: document control is the area in which most organisations fail their initial 'audit' inspection. Most successful document control systems for medium to large organisations require a computerised database with details of each copy of each document.

A fresh approach to document control is possible with electronic document distribution via computers. If documents are available only 'online', then there is no possibility of out of date copies being used. And if access to change the documents is controlled, their authorisation can be taken for granted. However this approach is not always feasible - for example, where documents have to be used away from a computer, or where documents developed outside the organisation (and available only on paper) have to be distributed.

Further reading: "Writing in Plain English", R D Eagleson, Australian Government Publishing Service. For a description of audience and task analysis, see British Standard BS 7649:1993. For Wheildon's work, see "Communicating, or just making pretty shapes", Newspaper Advertising Bureau of Australia, Sydney.

29/6/94

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This is one of a series of articles written by Phil Cohen and Onno van Ewyk, HCi . Most of the articles were also published in the Australian Financial Review. This article may be reproduced only with the permission of HCi Consulting (email HCi ). Copyright HCi, 1993-1998.