Free your mind: The art of writing procedure documents

[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

1. Find it in the kitchen
2. Empty it
3. Carry it over
4. Plug it in and turn it on, setting it to "High"
5. 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.