Business Process Documentation: 5 Benefits and Why You Should Use It

Business Process Documentation: 5 Benefits and Why You Should Use It process.st/business-process-documentation February 18, 2020

Jane Courtnell February 18, 2020

96% of companies had a form of process documentation in 2015.

Were you one of them?

What about today? Do you document your processes?

Is business process documentation still a popular approach?

These were the questions we at Process Street wanted to find the answers to. We asked top business experts from around the globe: How important is business process documentation for running a business?

In this article, we present to you our never-before-seen findings.

We successfully deciphered trends of the business process documentation market and 1/21

determined the reasons for these trends. I recommend that you take the time to read all we have to say about business process documentation, but if you’re pushed for time, you can access the relevant section from the links provided below: Shall we get started?

Business process documentation: What is business process documentation?

Business process documentation is the action of recording the necessary steps of a business operation, to design a process that meets an identified business need.

For Matt Diggity from Diggity Marketing

“…business cannot be run without documentation regardless of its size. From solopreneurs to large firms, all need documentation to keep records of operations.”

Like Matt, we at Process Street ♥love♥ documented processes.

Why? This isn’t some unfounded love affair. There is a mass of evidence demonstrating the positive outcomes documenting business processes has.

Business process: A business process is made up of a structured collection of tasks, performed in a specific sequence to deliver a business service or product.

As the saying goes, absence makes the heart grow stronger. The importance of process documentation is easily seen when documented processes are below par. Take a look at some examples where processes failed: NASA lost $193 million from the Mars Climate Orbiter satellite, which disintegrated due to process failures. These failures could have been prevented through the use of documented processes The Chernobyl disaster that resulted in 30 deaths was the result of a chain of human errors. All preventable with the implementation of documented processes Microsoft Azure experienced 4.46 billion hours of downtime collectively. This was due to a failed standard deployment process Having to re-engineer core processes lost Taco Bell $1.98 billion in 30 years The list goes on. Find out more about the above process documentation failures, with additional examples, by reading 17 BPM Statistics to Help You Increase Efficiency in Your Business.

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Business Process Management and its relation to business process documentation Business Process Management (BPM) is a discipline within which various methods are used to analyze, model, measure, improve, optimize and automate business processes. BPM is not possible without documented processes. Trends in the BPM market are therefore reflected in the prevalence of business process documentation, and the BPM market is growing. BPM is expected to increase by up to $13-14 billion by 2021.

Find out more about BPM and it’s relation to process documentation by reading: What is BPM? The Ultimate Guide to Getting Started.

The benefits given by business process documentation are slowly being realized. In 2015, an overwhelming number – 96% of companies – had a form of process documentation.

This is where we get into the core of this Process Street article. You see, we wanted to poke into these trends, to find out what is happening today.

We wanted to know: 1. Is business process documentation still popular as a tool for successful modern-day businesses?

2. What benefits does process documentation give to businesses?

We conducted qualitative research, and asked top business owners and experts across the globe: How important is business process documentation for running a business?

To dig-deep into this discussion, we asked the following sub-questions: 1. Do you implement business process documentation in your business?

2. Have you had an instance in your business that pushed you to start implementing process documentation?

3. How important do you think it is to document your business’s processes, and why or why not?

We collated our results, analyzed the findings and summarized the key takeaways in this article.

With that, are you ready?

Are you ready to be a first, to feast your eyes upon our never-before-seen findings?

Well, I’m excited, so let’s jump straight to it.

Scroll down to uncover the truth about all things business process documentation.

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Business process documentation: Do you implement business process documentation in your business?

How many businesses are using business process documentation? Source

First up, let us hold back on the details and ask: Do you implement business process documentation in your business?

A simple yes or no question, but one that sets the context for the rest of this article.

100% of our study group confirmed they use some sort of business process documentation in their business.

To repeat, that is 100%.

We were talking with pioneers.

Innovators.

Entrepreneurs.

They all confirmed the evolution of their businesses to contain business process documentation techniques. An adaption to survive business tooth-and-claw.

100%‌wow.

Extrapolating this 100% to the wider global business sphere would not be scientifically valid.

That is, from these results we cannot say that all modern-day successful companies 4/21

implement some sort of business process documentation (an increase from 96% in 2015 ).

Never-the-less, the results are promising for the suggestion that business process documentation is a popular business tool, and this popularity is set to rise.

With that said, our results can be used supplementary to the following findings: The global market for document management software will grow from $3.28 billion in 2018 to $11 billion in 2028 The BPM market was valued at $3.18 billion in 2018, growing to $3.38 billion in 2019, and is expected to increase to $4.5 billion by 2024 A key driver of the increasing BPM market includes cloud-based solution technology – just like Process Street – which helps businesses take advantage of BPM solutions at a low cost As mentioned before, there is a causal relation between BPM and process documentation.

To reiterate, you cannot have BPM without documented processes. Hence, as the BPM industry grows, process documentation grows. A trend reflected in our findings.

Ruggero Loda from Running Shoes Guru tells us how he uses Process Street, a cloud-based solution, to manage his documented processes for free:

“We have more than a dozen fixed contributors to our content and a handful come and go each year. We have different kinds of content that require different production and data entry processes on the site.

Having centralized business processes on how to create/upload this content has proven invaluable. When our processes change, it’s enough to change it once in Process Street and every checklist from then on will be the correct, updated one.

Not only that, using instances of lists helps me manage our content creation workflow. We keep a list of all the shoes we are reviewing on Airtable. I connected Airtable and Process Street using Zapier. This means when I update the status of a shoe in Airtable, an instance of a checklist gets created in Process Street and assigned to a member of our staff. Now they will know what’s expected of them, and I can keep an eye on the level of task completion“.

As you can see from Loda’s quote above, documenting processes allows him to use Process Street as a free BPM tool. The positive implications cascade through his business in the form of automations and access to other web-app tools. This saves Loda heaps of time. All from the simple act of documenting his processes.

In summation: Do you implement business process documentation in your business?

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The answer in short: Yes for 100% of our surveyed group.

Have you had an instance in your business that pushed you to start implementing process documentation?

Source

This next part of our query investigates what pushed our surveyed group to take action.

What spurred business owners to push the process documentation button?

For an explanation, we will look into some of our responses as case studies.

Dave Mason from Knobs details his moment of *eureka* upon discovering the power of process documentation. Get your reading glasses on, as this is a long, but valuable, quote:

“I didn’t get how important business process documentation was until one disastrous Saturday night a few years back…I was on vacation with my family in Costa Rica, with barely any internet access. Two weeks earlier, I had fired one customer service agent who was not working out and replaced her with another. That was no problem because she was being onboarded to a team with two other veteran agents. I’d always trusted the customer service team to train the newcomers in how to do the job.

Except when I checked my email Saturday night, I found two messages waiting for me from my two veteran agents. One was no big deal, just informing me that she was going to be taking her vacation soon for a family reunion. The other one told me she needed to take emergency medical leave. This meant I was going to be left with one, brand new agent. I quickly made a replacement hire and hoped the remaining veteran agent could get them both

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up to speed before her family reunion.

The results were a total disaster.

My sales plummeted… …my customers were getting angry… …the service was awful. Yet, I believe this was one of the best things to ever happen.

Why? Because in retrospect, I’d given far too little attention to the customer service team. I let them self-manage, but I had little insight into who was doing well and who wasn’t. I trusted old people to train the new, but did I know that the trainers were using best practices themselves?

At first, I started sending these long emails to the new customer service people telling them what they were doing wrong. Not a good technique for building trust and relationships. The newest guy got fed up and became useless, to the point that I had to just let him go.

Then I finally got smart. I started going over all of their chats with customers. But rather than sending them long messages telling them what they were doing wrong, I wrote a whole article on how we as a company like to handle such situations. I put the article into a brand new knowledge-base I was creating and sent the article to several agents to gain their insight.

Suddenly, I was no longer criticizing staff, and I was building a Knowledge-Base that would become the company’s primary training tool from that point on. Now, whenever we made new hires, they had a whole database telling them how to handle all of our common queries.

Our training became so much faster, standards clearer, and the service quality rose. It was one of the most important lessons I’d learned in my twenty years in business.”

Mason has given you hindsight. Don’t let your holiday be cut short, and start documenting your processes now.

Brad Ormsby from Colorstone marketing describes the time before he documented his processes:

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“Business documentation is critical to running your business. When I started in business, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. As a result, I spent day after day grinding away in the office.

When I eventually hired my first person, I needed an expert because I didn’t have standard processes for doing the position and had to rely on their pre-existing skillsets. When you hire experts, you pay expert prices and often run into challenges with keeping them motivated.”

Ormsby now documents duties for each position. This means he no longer has to pay premium prices to outsource experts for vacant positions.

Alex Kehoe from Caveni says…

“Early in the creation of our business, we had a number of projects go out with the team looking over them beforehand but without any sort of documentation, checklist, etc. On those occasions we had almost every client come back with a laundry list of issues they found which needed to be fixed.

The drain on resources was significant, and once the floodgate had been opened it seemed like we saw a much larger amount of requested changes coming in after bug fixing began.

Following these instances, we pushed hard for a QA checklist and dedicated processes. This allowed us to alleviate the problems we had at the end of production. Now, our entire process follows a stringent checklist and nearly all of our customers come out saying very positive things.”

It’s not just about implementing process documentation, your documented processes must be spot-on. Shabby processes have little use. This is something Jeff Neal from Capital Coating experienced:

“Luckily, when I started, Capital Coating already had processes in place. But, there was one critical instant. The wrong color got installed on a 3,000 square foot floor. It was a critical error because the customer would not accept the mistake. What went wrong was the manufacturer put the wrong color in the jug of pigment. The jug had the correct color name, but it was the wrong pigment. Thankfully, the manufacturer paid for us to go back and reinstall a new floor. But we had to change our process. We now keep drawcards of previous colors used and compare new pigments to those draw cards. This ensures the colors match“.

Initially, Jeff’s documented processes were poor. Not every part of his process had been documented, leading to significant workflow errors. Jeff picked up on this quickly and made the improvements necessary.

In summation:

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Have you had an instance in your business that pushed you to start implementing process documentation?

The answer in short: Improper business process documentation causes dire consequences, spurring business leaders to implement effective process documentation practices.

Looking back at Jeff’s quote, you will notice that he used his documented processes to identify process areas in need of improvement. In this, Jeff’s documented processes provided a platform for continuous improvement, a key reason why many business leaders, just like Jeff, implement process documentation.

On this point, we move onto our final query: How important do you think it is to document your business’s processes, and why or why not?

Business process documentation: How important do you think it is to document your business’s processes, and why or why not?

The why not part of this question is not applicable, as 100% of our respondents implement business process documentation practices. Instead, we are looking at the why, with continuous improvement being our first reason.

The importance of business process documentation and why it is implemented: Reason 1, continuous improvements Documented processes provide a baseline for continuous improvements. A statement supported by Tim Grinsdale, from Toad Diaries:

“…documentation provides an important baseline for continuous improvement. Once documented it can be reviewed by management, alongside the company member who is responsible for the process. Points of improvement can then be identified. (Say, for example, in the form of automation, streamlining the process, etc).”

This idea that "process documentation provides an important baseline for continuous improvement" dates back to 1998. A study by R.G. Lee and B.G. Dale reviewed and evaluated business process management. From within this study, they quoted:

“ all processes should have a clearly defined owner who reviews process performance and is responsible for their continuous improvement.” R.G. Lee and B.G. Dale, Business process management: a review and evaluation 9/21

Considering how process documentation stimulates continuous improvements, we turned to a quote by Simon Hansen from Homebrew Advice:

“Process documentations are filled with so much detail that it makes you aware of what techniques suit your business or not.”

To further explain, documenting business processes lays out business operations so that they can be scrutinized. From this, possible process weaknesses are identified for continuous updates and refinements. Refinements that could include the removal of certain business techniques and methods for the introduction of one more suited.

Drawing on from this, Avinash Chandra from Brandloom explains…

“We believe that documentation is part of process improvement in several of its phases. It provides a reliable and consensual basis to understand what the necessary improvements are and to make analysis and comparisons of results and performances.”

From Chandra’s quote, we can ascertain that documented processes stimulate process improvements by: "Providing a reliable and consensual basis to understand what the necessary improvements are" "Providing a reliable and consensual basis to make analysis and comparisons of results and performances " Process documentation gives a means of overcoming process constrains. Progression can be made in small incremental steps. Each step leads to optimal business operations.

Documentation of processes means improvement paths can be mapped for reflection over the improvements made. A common approach named Evolutionary Process Improvement.

Others within our study group named continuous improvements as a reason why they implemented business process documentation techniques. I have detailed the relevant responses below for your consideration: Melissa St Clair from Paper Chaser…

“Business process documentation is crucial for quality improvement of systems.”

Dan Langhofer from PaperWise…

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“You can identify some really valuable opportunities for process improvement. So many of the processes we do day-to-day popped up out of some old history, staying with our organization because of habit and reflex. Documenting your processes forces you to train a careful eye at each process. At each step, you ask: is this step still necessary and is there a way to combine, automate, off-load or further improve this step.”

Interesting stuff , but wait there is more.

Where do you think this need for continuous improvement comes from?

Andrea Loubier from Mail Bird gives us her thoughts…

…“keeping these documents updated is just as important as creating them. Things change over time and, when they do, be sure to amend your documented processes so that everything is always current.”

As Loubier says, continuous process improvements are needed for your business to keep up with the changing business environment. This idea is supported by DP Baron in the book Business and the Environment. As stated:

“If you are not prepared for change, then prepare to fail.” – DP Baron, Business and the Environment

The importance of business process documentation and why it is implemented: Reason 2, enables growth

Give your business room to grow Source 11/21

To re-iterate, a holdfast, unbending nature will slowly drown your business under the brunt of business change. This will not bode well for your profit line. As stated, documenting your processes means you ride the wave of change, and grow with it. By allowing your business to evolve with the change, business process documentation enables business growth.

To envisage this idea, I use an analogy that stems – literally – from my childhood experience of attempting to create a pine forest . Suffice to say, I was not successful in this. I did, however, manage to not kill one sapling. This grew to a meager height of 10 cm. The tree’s roots were constrained by its wooden plant pot. With thick, unbending, unchanging wooden walls of constraint, the sapling could not thrive.

No matter how much water, sunlight or nutrients (investment) I gave the tree, it did not grow taller. Not until the sapling was replanted in my local park.

Without the constraints of its pot’s hard-fast boundaries, the sapling spread its roots and flourished.

You can think of the wooden pot as unchanging, unbending business processes. As soon as you introduce an element of flexibility, room to maneuver and change, your business, like my sapling, will flourish.

Documenting your processes provides this process flexibility. Documenting processes, therefore, enables business growth. This benefit was picked up on by many of our respondents, as detailed below.

For Ryan Birdsell from Satx Technologies, documenting processes introduces flexibility for change and growth within departments. With documented role responsibilities, it is easy for Birdsell to hire new employees. This means the growth of his teams, and therefore his company is a painless process.

“Primarily our desire and capacity to grow, by bringing on more people, has pushed me to begin documenting our processes. When first starting a business, there are usually no more than a handful of people managing everything, so it’s all in their head. However, if someone falls ill, moves away, decides to leave the company, etc. then that part of the business slows down significantly as others work to learn and carry the load. By documenting these steps, it becomes much easier to train someone new or have someone step in temporarily to carry the workload.”

Luka Arezina from Data Prot uses documented processes for growth and to continuously change and onboard new employees…

“We outsource pretty regularly… business documentation enables us to streamline our work.”

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For Marc Avila from 3 Media Web, business change and growth came in the form of a merger. Avila details how documenting his processes proved significantly helpful in this instance:

“We’ve been a merged agency for just four years and upon the merger with Ladybugz Interactive (also a top Boston agency) we had to define processes that would allow us to scale and grow and not make the mistakes other agencies have made in the past.”

Aqsa Mirza from BosterBio explains how, as the business grows, documented processes support the companies fundamental structure and backbone. If the fundamentals of business broke down, this would bring the breakdown of the company as a whole.

“With business growth, more and more resources start getting involved. To keep accuracy and efficiency in business, it is obvious to follow the standard set of process rules that were documented in the beginning.”

Colin Ma from Freestyle Creative talks in a similar vein to Mirza…

“Process documentation is critical for any business that wants to scale and is always a priority in my businesses. I pay particular attention to the creation of standard operating procedures (SOPs). While it’s not a good decision to create your SOPs too early, creating them should always be on your mind as you do tasks. This will allow you to systemize it to improve productivity.”

Documented SOP processes enforce standards that provide the structural backbone of a business from which the company can expand and grow.

Arbitrarily changing your business processes will not solve your near-term business growth needs. You need to understand your business processes before you re-invent those processes for growth. That is, during business growth, you do not want to re-invent your original organizational process problems. By documenting your processes, and SOP’s, you create consistency to grow from. You can then map this growth from your as-is processes, to your to-be processes, and effectively formulate a plan for performance and growth.

By preventing the re-invention of "your original organizational process problems", process documentation reduces error. This brings us to the third reason for documenting processes…

The importance of business process documentation and why it is implemented: Reason 3, error reduction In 1998, a NASA designed Mars orbiter named Lockheed Martin was flung out and lost in the deep depths of space.

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Poor Martin.

As Martin explores space’s potential infinity, the NASA team came to grips with the $125 million mistake…Ouch.

A mistake caused by a simple maths error, where English measurements were mistaken for American measurements. As Edward Weiler put it:

“The problem here was not the error; it was the failure of NASA’s systems engineering, and the checks and balances in our processes to detect the error. That’s why we lost the spacecraft.” – Dr. Edward J. Weiler, Why the Mars Probe went off course Properly documented and implemented processes prevent error from creeping into operations. A reason why Jovan Milenkovic from Kommando Tech documents his processes, to avoid error from his busy to-do list:

“Whatever process I complete, I make sure to have a proper document that accompanies it.

One of the reasons is that my workload is huge and I can easily forget information or miss out on something important.”

Scott Summers from Hello Summers implements business process documentation for the same reason…

“I find tasks and checklists extremely effective for my own business and regularly implement similar systems for my clients. The reason is really simple: Busy people are really bad at remembering things!”

Missing out important steps will drain the quality of the service or product you provide. This, in turn, will negatively impact business reputation. A quote by Sharabi Moshe summarizes this point nicely…

“Today’s quality is tomorrow’s reputation“. – Sharabi Moshe, Today’s quality is tomorrow’s reputation (and the following day’s business success) For Joe Youngblood from JoeYoungblood.com, preventing error is all about nurturing business reputation.

“Business Process Documentation is critical, especially for a growing SEO, Social Media, and PPC agency. Without these documents something as simple as making an Instagram post could go awry, leaving our clients upset, wasting resources, and tarnishing our burgeoning reputation.”

Documenting processes is a common approach that ensures tasks within a business 14/21

process are remembered. This is good practice. Adults can remember only 3 to 4 meaningful items at any one time. This means our limited cognitive ability would cause process errors if not remedied. Process documentation provides that remedy.

Alexis Haselberger from AlexisHaselberger.com recognizes this limited cognitive ability, which is why he documents his processes…

“Process documentation is crucial to accuracy and scaling your business. When you document your processes you ensure that you don’t have to try to remember all the steps each time, decreasing the likelihood of error.”

Chris Stasiuk from Signature Video Group uses documented processes to conjure the kind of process accuracy the human brain would otherwise fail to muster…

“One of the checklists we implemented was for all work being sent to a client. We create videos, so our checklists include things like: were the clients brand guidelines used, are names spelled properly, was the video color graded/sound mixed correctly, etc…”

For Andrea Travillian from Aspirify, process documentation alleviates managemental strain by preventing errors Travillian and colleagues would otherwise miss…

“The first business I ever owned was an event planning business. This is where I learned the value of having documented processes and checklists. Without them, items that could make an event go easier were overlooked. This caused more problems at the end of the day. Once I began creating processes, it was easy for me and my staff to see what needed to be done. So no matter who planned the event, anyone could grab the checklists and pick the required process up right away. It made management much easier.”

Process errors will vary in severity. For example, NASA’s failed processes were costly. Ben Walker from Transcription Outsourcing explains how errors would be highly detrimental to his company. Process error could cause Walker to lose HIPAA and CJIS compliance, and with that, his clients. Without process documentation, Walker would have no business. Missing just one, single step, would sacrifice compliance, and with that, clients.

“Yes, we document all of our processes because we have to be HIPAA and CJIS compliant for our clients. We also do it so we can keep track of everything coming and going and not miss anything for our clients.”

In this essence, documented processes act as a form of risk management. As Luis Scott from Barder Scott says…

“Having definite process documentation mitigates the risk that comes with inconsistencies “ 15/21

You don’t want inconsistencies in business. Luckily, maintaining consistent operations is another benefit brought from business process documentation, giving us our 4th reason.

The importance of business process documentation and why it is implemented: Reason 4, business consistency

Source

There has been a rapid shift in recent years, with businesses and workforces operating across continents and countries. This complex blend of cultures and business operations needs to capture the benefits of diversity, whilst also maintaining consistency. Process documentation can help keep business processes consistent.

Team diversity pays. Especially when included alongside documented processes. Process documentation maintains consistency within roles for diverse teams. To explain how we turn to a quote by Datis Mohsenipour from Outback Team Building:

“Role manuals were implemented before I joined the company, however, there was an instance for me where they were critical for the success of our department. A few years back, I had a team member who was in charge of managing our website transfer to a new custom CMS. Given the fact that the CMS was highly customized, there were a lot of unique elements to it that had to be documented. That team member decided to switch career paths midway through the project, but I was able to step in and pick up where they left off by using the role manuals that were created.�

There have been glimpses, from previous responses, suggesting that documented 16/21

processes make particular business operations achievable for most – if not all – employees with suitable skillsets. For Mohsenipour, this meant the unexpected leave from an employee did not halt business operations. Neither did it degrade business processes. Processes could be carried out as usual with the documentation of appropriate knowledge and information.

This is perfect for diverse teams, maintaining processes across borders.

Consistency is key to business success. As clearly put by The Good Alliance, business consistency: Ensures efforts are aligned Defines your brand and makes sure you stick to it Makes sure your plans are seen through Analyzes the results from your efforts Means you can measure how changes impact your clients Day-to-day hiccups and process issues will arise. The beaten track of business is not a smooth one. However, as Wes Foster from Wesfed puts it…

“Not every process is going to be airtight, so having the end-result in mind throughout ensures we can deliver on our promises AND keep it consistent.”

Business process documentation consistently irons out process irregularities and hiccups for sustained business success and error removal. As Reuben Yonatan from Get Voip says, there is no need to solve problems…

“…every single time we do a task. When you create documentation around how to do something, regardless of the complexity, you help streamline operations.”

Using process documentation for consistently smooth, error-free and streamlined operations works for companies of all sizes. Even if you are starting small, and scaling-up.

As Brian Taylor from Foxicommerce says:

“Process documentation…helps ensure your business can provide a scalable, consistent service and product offerings.”

Through consistency, comes process standardization. Standardized processes reduce process error.

Errors waste time. As confirmed by Markelle Harden from Kowmad

“ If we follow documented processes, we’re able to move faster.”

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This stands for any business operation, from your accounting operations, your marketing operations, to your onboarding operations. For example, for Joel Thomas from Stratos Jets, process documentation…

“dramatically reduced the time it takes to bring a new hire to profitability “ This idea that process documentation brings forth time savings through error reduction is our 5th and final reason of why our respondents implemented it.

The importance of business process documentation and why it is implemented: Reason 5, time savings We have all heard that popular quote:

“Time is money“- Benjamin Franklin, Time Is Money Quotes A plausible quote, which makes logical sense. However, when considering time in business, it is important to keep in mind one key detail. Although time may equal money, we are talking about productive time here. That is, there is little use slogging away 10 hours a day, with 4 of those hours being unproductive with decreased cognitive ability. A study by Vertanen.M et al (2009) examined the relationship between long working hours and cognitive function.

Working more than 40 hours a week is associated with lower cognitive function and declines in performance. That is, despite the increase in working time, improvements in production were lacking.

A few companies in Sweden took this concept and applied it to shorten the working day from 8 to 6 hours.

What did they find?

Shorted working days brought huge boosts in workplace productivity. Employees were making better use of their time. Time efficiencies increased.

Through process documentation, you gain money-making productive time. Process documentation makes you more efficient. As you are more efficient, working time is reduced, which increases productivity and efficiencies further.

This rings true for any business process, whether that be training your new employees, conducting relevant HR processes, developing software, or employee onboarding procedures. For instance, Shane Griffiths from Clarity Online details how process documentation has saved him heaps of money-giving time for his employee onboarding processes…

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“One time we started working with a client and realized a few months later that we forgot to set up automatic billing! We realized that we needed to document a process for client onboarding. We wrote down all the steps, ordered them, and saved them as a template. This has saved us a ton of time.”

For Angela Hope from Upflip, process documentation has given back valuable time during her employee training processes:

“process documentation can save hours in training“ On this topic, it is time for us to conclude our response to the question: How important do you think it is to document your business’s processes, and why or why not?

In summation: How important do you think it is to document your business’s processes, and why or why not?

The answer in short: 100% of respondents think that business process documentation is important for a business. This is because business process documentation…

Reason 1: Gives continuous improvements Reason 2: Aids business growth Reason 3: Reduces error Reason 4: Provides consistency Reason 5: Saves time

How to use Process Street to document your business processes It is all very well understanding the importance of business process documentation, with reasons why you should implement it. But if you don’t know how to document your processes, then there is little actionable value here… *Enter Process Street* For those of you that are unfamiliar with Process Street and our offerings, check out our Monthly Webinar: An Introduction to Process Street below, for further insight.

Use Process Street as your BPM tool A BPM tool is a disciplined approach to document, measure, manage, monitor and control your documented business processes. You can use Process Street as your advanced BPM tool for free.

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Process Street is superpowered checklists. With Process Street you can document your business processes using a checklist approach.

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, there have been many studies observing the profound benefits checklists bring as a tool to document and manage processes. For more on this, I recommend you read: The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.

For a quick synopsis, read The Checklist Manifesto Review, which you can access here .

With this in mind, you can reap checklist benefits by documenting your business processes in Process Street. Once more, our checklists are not limited to tick-box lists…

No. As I mentioned before, Process Street’s checklists are superpowered. How? Process Street has updated and refined the checklist approach by incorporating the following features into our checklists…

With these features, our checklists are dynamic and adaptable process management machines.

For more information on how you can document your business processes via a checklist in Process Street, watch the below video: I have also embedded our Employee Onboarding Checklist, to give you a taste of how Process Street works, and the kind of checklists you can create.

Click here to access our Employee Onboarding Checklist for free We have a wealth of free to use template resources, just like our Employee Onboarding Checklist, ready and waiting for you to jump right in. Check out our template library here.

Using one of our free pre-made templates means you do not need to spend the time documenting your processes, we have done all the work for you. Our checklists are appropriate for any business operation. So much so that Richard Cross from The Dog Clinic loves Process Street and uses us for all of his processes…

“My business partner and I are also huge fans of Process Street – we use it for all our processes!”

Business process documentation is the key to success, implement it today using Process Street To conclude, Ryan Pitylak from Zen Business says…

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“Business process documentation is something every company should explore implementing.

This can help with a multitude of aspects related to the business, from supporting documents to help onboard and train new employees to ensure work stays consistent…”

According to Alexandra Zamolo from BeeKeeper, using business process documentation means your company will run like…

“a well-oiled machine.”

With that said, we have seen that business process documentation is increasing in popularity. From our novel qualitative research, we can ascertain five reasons for this: Reason 1: Business process documentation gives continuous improvements Reason 2: Business process documentation aids business growth Reason 3: Business process documentation reduces error Reason 4: Business process documentation provides consistency Reason 5: Business process documentation saves time You can use Process Street, for free, to document any of your business processes with ease.

So what are you waiting for?

Sign up for Process Street today and get started documenting your business processes just like the experts do. .

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