Documenting Your Processes

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

In order to keep the project sound, you need to make sure that the processes and tasks you are doing continue in your absence. Your absence might be due to vacation or illness, or perhaps you have moved on from the organization. As a project manager, you want to do everything you can do to keep the work of the project going even without you, and that means that you need to document your processes very carefully.

While it may not seem very important when you are in the middle of executing a large project, sometimes the process documentation is what saves a project when key positions turn over unexpectedly. The success of the project might just depend on someone else being able to quickly pick up the tasks and work that you are doing.

Breaking Things Down
The first step in documenting your processes is to break them down as much as possible. It might seem like you just need to tell someone to update the project schedule and leave it at that, but the reality is you have spent the last six months creating custom filters and text fields with lots of acronyms and abbreviations. You need to pull apart everything you have done and explain it in simple terms. Even the most experienced project scheduler will not understand your shorthand terms in text field 2 that tell you which divisions are working on the task--and thus they will not know who to talk to about the weekly …

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