Reviving the Forgotten Process

  Knowledge Shelf  

My story began in November 2009, when I joined the new Total Quality Department in my company. Our function was to revive a process that had been documented from previous years and had not been governed through the project executions in our company. We had to assure the quality of work; in this attempt, we knew our documentation was already available and theoretically well-prepared. Unfortunately, the documentation did not reflect how the work was being conducted in our company and it also lacked consistency in its structure and design (e.g., each process was documented differently, without the same sections and flowcharts).

If you want to know why documented processes are needed in any company, then try answering these questions:

• How do you know if you are on the right track or not?
• How will you know what you need to do next?
• How can you calculate your progress?
• What do you do if something goes wrong and with whom do you need to refer and consult?
• How do you communicate the project’s status to upper management, what data need to be presented, and where do you start?
• If a key manager resigns, then who is responsible for keeping things running on the right track?

Information is power and to sustain this power, it needs to be documented. If you depend on passing  information orally then, one day, either the employees …

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