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The Process Champion Standard
A published format for writing down how a business does its work. What goes in a guide, how a step is written, where the training goes instead, and what has to be true before anyone follows it.
Version 0.4. In active use on client work, and being finished in the open. Version 1.0 is what gets published for outside use.
A template is a blank page with lines on it.
You can find a thousand of them. They're free, they look fine, and almost none of them get filled in. That isn't the template's fault. A blank page doesn't tell you what to write, how much detail is too much, where one job stops and the next starts, or how to get the information out of the person who has it.
A standard is the format plus the answers to those questions.
Because the format was never the hard part.
We write process guides for a living. If a published format meant nobody needed us, this would be a bad business to be in.
What's hard is the rest of it. Four people do the same job four different ways, and somebody has to sit with all four, work out which version is actually right, and write the one that goes on the wall. That's the work, and it isn't something a document can hand you.
The format we can hand you.
What's in it
Three homes
One question sorts every document a company has: when do you touch it? While you're doing the work, it's a guide. When you don't know how, it's a how-to. When you need to know what's allowed, it's a policy. Three places, and nothing lands in two of them.
Two buckets
Process is what you check every time. Training is what you learned once. The test is whether somebody on their hundredth time would still need the line. Hang the boxes is process. Forty-eight inches to the top, off finished floor is training.
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Link, never paste
When a step needs something that lives somewhere else, it links to it. Pasted content goes stale the day the original changes, and now the company has two versions of the truth and knows about one.
How a step is written
One action. Verb first. One sentence. Condition before action. Two levels of numbering and never three, because a third level means you've found a separate procedure.
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The guide card
Whose job it is, what it's for, what's measured about it, when it starts, when it's done, who owns it, what version it is, and when it was last looked at. Every guide, by construction.
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Three Yeses
The person who does the work says it's what actually happens. The person who owns the process says it's what should happen. Someone who can commit the company says this is how we do it now. Three, always, however many people contributed.
What it deliberately doesn't do
It doesn't enforce anything. It won't tell you who runs the work, who follows up, or how you measure whether it got done. That belongs to whatever operating system your company runs on.
This standard produces the documents. The operating system makes them stick.
Which means you can adopt it without changing how the company is run, and your operating system can adopt it without changing what it enforces. They sit next to each other on purpose.
Every part of it sets a ceiling, and the ceiling is the point
Three limits. Nothing else.
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3000 words
A guide
Over it, split into two
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10 steps
A procedure
Or group them into named phrases
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One sentence
A step
Twenty words
If it doesn't fit, either you don't understand it yet, or you're writing a training document, which is a different thing.
A guide is what you'd hand to the person replacing the person who does this.
One job. From a trigger to a done. Written so somebody who has never done it can follow it, and short enough that somebody who does it every day will still check it. That definition does more work than it looks like. It rules out the forty-page manual nobody opens, and it rules out the sticky note that only makes sense to the person who wrote it.
FIVE CHECKS BEFORE IT'S RELEASED
01
Complete
Does following every step, and only these steps, finish the job?
02
Under the ceiling
Word count, step count, numbering levels, heading levels.
03
Filtered
Does every warning earn its place, and does each one say why?
04
Captured, not remembered
Was this written next to the work, and has the person who does the job read it back and corrected it?
05
Warnings earned
Could the step be removed, replaced, or made hard to get wrong instead?
All pass or fail. No judgment required.
Built against the international standards for documented information
Every guide carries the identification, format, media, and review-and-approval attributes required by ISO 9001 clause 7.5.2, and is version-controlled, retrievable and retention-managed per clause 7.5.3.
The format is structured to the principles and structural requirements of IEC/IEEE 82079-1:2019, the international standard for preparing information for use — which defines a product as a system, a service, goods, software, information, or a combination thereof. A service business's operating procedures are not a stretched analogy under it.
Written to the four plain-language principles of ISO 24495-1: relevant, findable, understandable, usable.
That supports your organization's ISO 9001 conformance. Certification remains a matter for your organization and its certification body.
ISO does not certify documents, products, or standards, and no certification to these standards is claimed or implied. ISO 9001 certification applies to an organization's quality management system and is awarded by independent certification bodies. Standards are cited for reference; ISO is not affiliated with, and does not endorse, Process Champion.
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