Why Should We Document Processes?
Documented processes can create many benefits including…
- Identifying the scope of a team’s work and where there is a need to work with others across the University.
- Assisting with the training and understanding of colleagues.
- Highlighting opportunities for making improvements to the way we do things and enhancing our service to students, colleagues and research partners.
- Providing a baseline for improvement activity and helping us to understand which processes and activities would be impacted if we were to make a change.
- Improving the shared understanding of how the University operates.
- Removing the risks associated with “single points of failure” and enabling improved business continuity.
- Illustrating a consistent, standard way of doing things.
- Identifying the scope of a process, its inputs and its outputs and gaining context of where that process fits within our organisation.
- Offering evidence to auditors and regulators that processes are being conducted appropriately
By documenting our processes, we are able to create a shared understanding of who is performing our procedures, the activity they undertake and where we might make improvements.