Documenting Process Improvements

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.

  Communications Management   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

Processes are the gears that keep an operation or a project running smoothly. However, if the processes are not working correctly, then they may need to be reviewed and revised (or even scrapped) for a better process entirely.

As you create process improvements, the documentation and communication will be the key ingredients to make them work correctly. After all, you can create the best process in the world, but if no one knows to use it (or no one knows how to use it), it will be essentially worthless.

The Starting Documentation
There should be documentation that describes the current process. Unfortunately, that is not always the case; but if there is, that is what you should start with. Take that documentation and be very familiar with it.

If it does not exist, then you need to spend some time creating it. Documenting a process will involve interviewing the participants, managers and stakeholders involved with the process. You need to take the information from them and put it into a logical organized format in order for the process to be understood. This starting documentation is an excellent place to start work on improving the process.

Breaking Down the Steps
Once you have the initial documentation, then you need to start breaking down the steps and determining where the areas are that can be improved. This process should involve a lot of repetition as you …

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