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Business process documentation, without the jargon
What is business process documentation?
Writing down how a job actually gets done, so somebody other than the person doing it can follow it. One job at a time, from the thing that starts it to the thing that finishes it. Not a manual describing the company. A set of documents somebody can work from.
Why does it usually not get finished?
Five reasons. Nobody has decided where it goes. Nobody knows what it should look like. It's permanently the third priority on a Tuesday. The team was asked once and nothing followed. And the one nobody says out loud: asking the person who has done a job for fourteen years to write it down feels like telling them they're replaceable.
How much detail is enough?
One test settles it. Would somebody on their hundredth time still need this line? If yes, it belongs in the process. If no, it's training, and it belongs somewhere else and gets linked to. Writing the how inside the process is how a two-page document becomes forty.
Who should write it?
Not the person who does the job. They're the source, not the author — most people aren't writers, know it, and already have a full week. Somebody else asks, watches, and writes. The person who does the job reads it back and corrects it.
Where should it live?
Wherever your people already look when they don't know something. If you need to know who read what, you're buying software. If you have six guides and eleven people, a shared drive is genuinely fine.
What does it cost?
Written internally, somewhere around $1,150 a guide in salary time — spread across the person who knows the work, the person writing it up, whoever reconciles the versions people actually use, and you. Done for you, $1,450 for one guide and $11,500 for ten.
How long does it take?
Thirty days per guide from the point capture is complete. In practice, about three guides a month, and roughly two hours a week of your team's time.
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