What is Process Documentation

Process documentation is a roadmap for your organization—it helps you identify the current state of a process to know how you can improve it. Any task that is done more than once or completed by multiple people needs to be documented. Doing so provides consistency for your organization and allows you to monitor and revise processes as you go along.

Think about it this way—even highly skilled pilots who spend thousands of hours training and flying rely on preflight checklists. They don’t just rely on memory, and no step is considered too minute.

Process documentation also allows you to know what people are doing and gain insight into the inner workings of the company. If you don’t document a process, essentially it is being re-designed by someone every time it is repeated. When an employee leaves, any process knowledge leaves with them unless it has been properly recorded.

When you hire new employees, you need a documented process to help them understand their role and how it fits within the overall organization. Documented processes facilitate formal training that allows for smooth onboarding.

Process documentation becomes especially crucial when dealing with projects working towards social change, as it focuses on recording the perceptions and changes in perceptions of involved stakeholders.

Today’s world consists of users who just want to get things done. They have so many things competing for their attention—they demand intuitive and task-based information, which is where process documentation becomes key.