[by Alumnus Jonathan Lange]
In our lives, we often perform tasks with many steps that are ultimately
mindless. For example, one might prepare a simple breakfast of scrambled eggs
on toast with coffee, or set up church in a community center, or advertise
across a university campus for a student union event. While there may be an
element of creativity in each of these tasks -- shall I put thyme in my eggs?
can I decorate the hall in some special way? how shall we brand our event? --
there is a large element of simple work: remember that the teaspoons need to
be put out; find the teaspoons; put them on the table with the urn.
Enter the procedure document. It is a time-honored method of helping clever,
creative people do multi-step tasks in a way that guarantees a basic level of
quality and enables a much higher level of quality by letting those creative,
clever people use their minds for things other than remembering to put out the
teaspoons.
Every good procedure document has a few key elements:
- pre-requisites, things you must be, have or have done before you use it
- outcomes, a checklist of what the world will look like when it's done
- concrete steps for reaching the outcomes
A normal person in your group should be able to pick up a procedure document,
do the things on it, reach the outcomes and know that they have done
well. Then, when Jake is sick and cannot set up church for the evening, anyone can step in and do an excellent job.
To do this, you must write a document that assumes the reader is rushed,
stressed, entirely lacks common sense and does not really know what they are
doing.
For example, "Set up the coffee table" is a good start, but not good
enough. It is very important to have it there, because otherwise your rushed,
stressed reader will forget all about it. However, as a step it needs more
information. Where is the coffee table? Where should I put the physical table
itself? What should I put on it? Is there an urn? Where is the urn? How do I
know when I'm done?
A much better step would be something like:
- Set up the coffee table
- Get a fold-up table from the storage room
- Set it up by the window nearest the kitchen
- Get the clear plastic box marked "Coffee" from the storage room
- Spread the table cloth from the box over the table
- Ask someone to set up the urn
- Find it in the kitchen
- Empty it
- Carry it over
- Plug it in and turn it on, setting it to "High"
- Fill it up on jug at a time using the big plastic jug kept
under the sink
- Put the tea, coffee and milo containers on the table, labels facing away
from the window - Take one mug and put all of the clean teaspoons in it
- Make a cup of tea now, and put the used teabag & teaspoon in another mug
(This is the best way of telling people where to put their dirty
teaspoons)
Notice the redundancy is some of the descriptions, e.g. the 'clear plastic box
marked "Coffee"'. This is to help the reader be sure that they are doing the
right thing. If there is a box marked "Coffee" that's not clear plastic, they
will know they are on the wrong track.
Note also that practically every physical action has a step, e.g. "Empty
it". This is a good rule-of-thumb for writing a procedure document. When
writing procedure documents involving doing things on a computer, you need to
find a level of detail that approximates physical actions, e.g. Click
'Submit'; Type 'foo' and press Enter; Double-click on the icon marked
'Trouble'.
It is not in the example, but remember to refer to people by role rather than
by name. Instead of saying "Mike", say "the head staff-worker" or whatever is
actually appropriate for the document. If you mention a person by name, the
reader will want to know why that person and not another, and will not know
what to do when that person is unavailable.
In any case, after the step, there should also be something like:
"When you are done, guests should be able to find the coffee table, make a
cup of tea without waiting for the urn to boil and put their used teaspoons
somewhere without having to ask for help. The coffee table should look
elegant, clean and well-presented."
And of course, before the "set up the coffee table" step, there would be a
list of pre-requisites:
- Fresh full-cream milk and fresh soy milk for the coffee table
(if you cannot find these, ask the MC, who will know who is responsible
bringing them)
One of the best ways to write such a document is to do so while actually
performing the task in question, or while observing someone perform it. It is
very easy to forget things when one is simply sitting at a desk in an office
and *imagining* what the procedure is.
Once the document is written, whether on-the-spot or later in some
imagination-fueled fit of documentation, it is not actually finished until
someone has used it to perform the procedure. For this, it is best to have the
process performed by a person who has not done the task in question before,
supervised by someone who has. The supervisor should have a copy of the
document and be updating it as the newbie goes through the steps, asks
questions, becomes confused and so forth.
For example, after following the procedure, the supervisor might notice that
there is an ugly clear plastic box marked "Coffee" in the middle of the
community hall. The supervisor would then add a step saying "Put the box
marked 'Coffee' back in the storage room where you found it".
Then, crucially, the document must be put somewhere it can be found. But
that's a subject for a different article.
There it is. Now you can go ahead and write procedure documents, thus freeing
your mind from worrying about mindless activities.
By Jonathan Lange, CC-BY-SA.
