Best Practices for Developing Policies, Processes, and Procedures

The content and documentation of Policies and Procedures must be researched, analyzed, compiled and tested before moving to a Content Management system.

The following is a sampling of Best Practices when developing and implementing Business Processes, Policies, and Procedures.

1. Establish format, content, and writing standards.
2. Evaluate body of work to be documented. With Business Processes, determine a breakdown of the functions and tasks within the Process.
3. Identify development team, content developers, writers, and reviewers. Keep the functions separate (although the same person may perform multiple functions).
4. Do not combine a Policy, Process, and Procedure in one document. There may definitely be a one-to-many relationship. They should be three separate documents, with references to the other.
5. Do not write everything in one document. This will cause the author to automatically break the document into objects. Limit the size of a single document to a specific number of pages.
6. Set up templates to be used by authors to ensure consistency of design and format.
7. Set up a vocabulary to ensure consistency of terms. This step encompasses many purposes, from user understanding to keyword search results. Multiple definitions for a single term can cause a great deal of confusion to a user.
8. Use Version Controls. It is important to set up a method for version controls, even if you don’t have a CM system.
9. Set up a preliminary Taxonomy. Much user documentation is unstructured content. Therefore, must apply some structure to make use of documentation easy to access, use, and update. Taxonomy information, categories, and keywords should be assigned to documents.
10. Test all documentation for correctness and application. Documentation will not be used, if it is incorrect. As with product documentation, internal system and process documentation should carry the same rigid control