How To Document Your Business Processes

Are you interested in writing your own business processes but don't know where to start?

In today's video, I've broken down the three components to effectively document your business processes.

Transcription

Hi, it's Xavier Chang, Principal of XC Consulting. Today I'm back with another episode of Xcel with Xavier, and today I'm teaching you how to document your own processes. So you might be in a situation where you want to gain more control of your business, you want to give yourself more options, either if that's to take time off, delegate tasks to somebody within the team. It could also to gain more control of the organization. So eliminating things like a single point of failure, that's really critical. So today I'm going to walk you through three things that you want to think about when you're documenting your processes. So let's jump right into it.

And these slides are from a recent webinar. So I'm going to full screen these. And the first is to define the steps. And the steps are the individual tasks that make up a process. So this is actually based off of a real client process for logistics. So I've removed some of the detail, but it basically lays out the steps from a logistics process, everything from placing the order to flagging and handling discrepancies. And the reason you want to document the steps or define the steps is because if one person is doing this, if it's a manager or if it's an analyst, you want to make sure that you don't have a single point of failure. So when that person leaves, you actually know what those steps are, and that can be passed on to the next employee, could be passed on to the next manager, whoever that may be. They need to have some type of baseline to get started with. So number one, define the steps.

Number two is understanding your responsibility matrix. So if you don't know the responsibility matrix, also known as RACI, is a great way to identify stakeholders and understand what is their responsibility or what's their stake in a certain process or task. So I'm going to go through these really quickly. So the responsible party is the individual that's actually doing the work. The accountable is the individual ensuring the work is done correctly and completely, typically, a manager. Consulted could be one or more parties helping with planning, brainstorming, or problem-solving. And then you have the informed. And then once again, this is one or more parties receiving updates on a process or task status. So those are basically the statuses of responsibility that you can have in a process.

So this is how it would look like in a real process. So looking at the steps we previously defined, everything from placing the order to flagging discrepancies. Here across the top, we also identified the various stakeholders. So in this import process, we've got buyer, logistics, supplier, warehouse, sales. And then for each cross-section between task and stakeholder, we also have if they're responsible, accountable, consulted, or informed. And the reason you do this is once you have this level of complication with five different stakeholders and a multi-step process, things get a little bit blurry sometimes when you don't write down or document what the processes are and define who does what. So this protects you from finger pointing, when the buyer might say, "Oh, that was actually logistics," or a supplier might say, "That's the warehouse responsibility." When you document it in this fashion, everybody knows who's involved and what's the role in each of the tasks. So that's number two, the responsibility matrix.

And finally, we've got defining the due dates. So in our first step, we defined the steps or the task, everything from placing the order to flagging discrepancies. Next, we've identified the stakeholders, and here I've written down the responsible party or the party that's actually doing the work. So buyer, logistics, supplier, et cetera. Lastly, I want you to think about the due date. And the due date is super helpful because it gives your people that are doing the work, it gives them something to work towards. It gives them a date that they can have in their calendar and that they know they need to do something by. So thinking in a personal life, it's really important to have due dates to make sure bills get paid on time, appointments aren't missed. It's the same thing with business processes. So having the due dates is super critical to making sure that people get the task done on time and completely.

So those were the three. You've got defining the task or the steps. It's thinking about the responsibility matrix. Responsibility matrix is the different stakeholders, their involvement in a task. And then lastly, it's thinking about due dates. So those are the three tips on how to document your processes. So hopefully you thought this was helpful. If you did, please give me a like, consider subscribing to the channel if you haven't already, and would love to field your questions. So we're not doing this live, but if you do have any questions that come up while you're documenting your processes, would love to answer them, love to share any best practices, or maybe even create a video based off of one of your questions. So thanks again, and I will see you next week.

Thanks for watching another episode of Xcel with Xavier. I've got new episodes coming out every Thursday morning. Please don't forget to like this video and subscribe to my channel to receive notifications of new content. Thanks again, and I hope to see you again next time.