Author Archives: Barra Ó hÍr

Originally published on 17th December 2020. https://www.thinkbusiness.ie/articles/why-documenting-process-matters/ Business and start-up adviser Barra Ó hÍr outlines the critical importance of documenting processes to keep everything running smoothly. Everybody’s been there. You take on a new role and couldn’t be more excited when, all of a sudden, you’re launched into a new process that you’ll be repeating multiple times and there isn’t a written procedure available to guide you through. You scramble to take notes while whoever is training you talks you through the process. It can feel like you’ve hit a wall in terms of learning and productivity. If you have chicken scratch handwriting it’s even worse. You’ve been thrown in the deep end. Again! But what if your predecessor had taken the time and the effort to document the process so that it acts as a map for you?  What if they were supported and encouraged by management and a learning culture to do so? If you had been adequately supported from the beginning, the following could have happened instead: You would boost your productivity and contribution faster, through learning the role in a better, more structured way. This could lead to a gentle learning curve rather than a steep wall. You could learn your job while asking fewer questions about basic things, such as what the source of a particular figure was. You could still ask questions (and you would be enthusiastically encouraged to do so in a learning organisation) and that would solidify the process for you even more. The key point is to distinguish key elements from the less important parts of the fog that you have to deal with on your first few runs through a task. Once you’re clear with it all, then it would be your turn to update the process documentation to fill in any…

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