Auditing in a Cis Environemnt

5 Steps for Documenting Your Systems

2011 | Dec 14 in Home Page News , Management

By Bobby Burns, E-Myth Business Coach

Great systems without documentation are only rumors about the way you do things in your business.

A procedure without clear directions is little more than anassumption about the way things should be done.

Without documentation, all your tasks, functions, processes, and procedures – the way that you and your staff habitually doeverything – are nothing more than good intentions.  

In other words, you need to write it down.

You may want to resist this notion.

But how many times have you found yourself telling your employees how to do something? Again, and again, and again?

Have a Plan

My client, Ron, is a great boss and a true visionary.  He might be seen as the embodiment of the Entrepreneur. He has a great team and a thriving business.  But it wasn’t always such. There was a time when he would come to our coaching meetings exasperated and highly agitated.

“Why can’t people just get it?” he would ask.

“Get what?” I would respond.

“How to do things right? I’ve told them I don’t know how many times… and they still manage to screw it up.”

It turns out that Ron had three account managers who had the same tasks and responsibilities, but managed to find at least three different ways of carrying them out!

It was a rare day when there were no problems resulting from this lack of consistency.

“I hired these guys for their experience.” He said, “They should be able to figure it out. Lord knows I did!”

Sadly, Ron was completely correct in his assumption.  They had “figured it out” – by doing it in whatever way they had in their previous jobs!

Ron had his way of doing things, knew how he wanted them done, but he had not followed through beyond trusting that repeated verbal warnings and “showing them” would suffice.

It became apparent that, while Ron had a large number of systems in his head for his managers to follow, very few were actually...