8 Steps for Effective Business Process Documentation Using the Right Tools

By the end of World War II, Japan’s economy was effectively destroyed. And yet, over the next few decades, it became the third largest economy in the world, following only the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Arguably, the most important non-Japanese person who contributed to Japan’s post-war miracle was W. Edwards Deming, an American business theorist. [1] One of his most famous quotes goes like this:

“If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.”

In other words, if you don’t have proper business process documentation, thoroughly recording every business activity within your organization, you and your employees are just fiddling in the dark.

Describing your processes is essential to ensure that your company’s mission statement is ingrained in everything you do and that your employees know where they stand, how they can best contribute to the company, and how they can advance.

Business processes far too often revolve around charts, workflows, and efficiency metrics while neglecting the human at the core of it all. We at Atlas UP want to change this and make business processes more about humans and less about numbers.

What Is Business Process Documentation and Why Is It Important?

Business process documentation can come in a variety of forms, including but not limited to the following:

• Checklists
• Flowcharts
• Onboarding documents
• Training manuals
• Instructional infographics
• Intranets
• AI-based employee assistance tools
• Customer support guides
• Brand guidelines
• Video tutorials

If you do not document them, even the best processes that your company has built will be fragile and vulnerable at times, such as when introducing new products, making significant changes, scaling up, and facing marketplace fluctuations.

While this is extremely important, the lack of proper business process documentation will negatively affect your employees the most. Take a look at some of the examples:

• They will not understand the company's mission.
• They will find it difficult to find their way around the organization.
• They will be more prone to mistakes.
• They will fear trying out new things.
• They will have no idea of how to advance.
• They will feel confused and anxious.
• They will be more likely to leave.

On the other hand, there are a wealth of advantages that your company can expect to enjoy if you follow the best practices in the business process documentation.

Benefits of Business Process Documentation

Before we go into our eight steps, we’d like to elaborate in a bit more detail on the benefits of doing business process documentation.

Turn Your Company Into a Well-Oiled Machine

It goes without saying that your business processes will be based on the most successful practices that your company has adopted over time. By documenting them, you ensure that everyone who could benefit from a process has immediate access to the information that will allow them to follow the optimal ones.

For one, this will greatly reduce the anxiety employees often feel when they are not sure what to do and what not to do. Moreover, by identifying best practices, you are celebrating the employees who are good at what they do.

Furthermore, making the best practices readily available to managers or VP/C-level people will free up their time to do what they should be doing.

How Can Atlas UP Help?

This is where Atlas UP can become your best ally. Once you feed it your company data, you and the rest of your leadership team can access all the pertinent information by simply asking questions, much as you would an assistant who just happens to have all the information about your company memorized.

For instance, you can ask Atlas UP questions such as, “What steps are included in our hiring process for new developers?” and it will provide your employees with an outline of the process without having to go over piles of documentation.

Turning Company Vision Into Living, Breathing Company Culture

Your organization's mission and vision provide the "why" behind everything you do. However, vision without execution is a mirage. Business process documentation is the direct action that makes your mission and vision a reality. While you can articulate certain core values as a company, it's your process documentation that puts these into practice, transforming ideas into practical realities.

Process documentation captures and codifies your company culture into the DNA of the organization. It ensures that the culture of your organization stays intact even after the founder or another key leader steps away. This preservation of culture is crucial for maintaining a consistent organizational identity and operational approach.

Give Your Employees a Safety Net and Let Them Innovate

If you have a process that has been proven to work, it is only natural that you wish it to become a standard practice in your organization.

This is where business process documentation shines – it provides a detailed framework for your employees to follow in order to achieve a minimum of their required results. This is particularly important for new employees who often feel anxiety about joining a new team and not being sure about where to start.

This does not in any way mean that you shouldn’t encourage personal initiative or force people to blindly follow steps. On the contrary, it provides a safety net for the employees, a safe starting point from where they can take all the initiative they want, knowing also that it will be recognized and valued.

Training and Onboarding That Is More Than a Goody Bag

Onboarding and training new employees is another major benefit. By providing them direct access to such resources, you help new employees find their way around the company and shorten the time it takes them to integrate and start doing great work.

One potential danger here is that if there is a lot of documentation, you need to be careful that it is not overwhelming for them and that they still receive personal support from within the company.

Funnily enough, a good way to do this is to have an onboarding process established and (of course) documented.

How Can Atlas UP Help?

AtlasUP can act as their onboarding buddy, someone they can ask all the questions they might feel anxious to ask their colleagues or onboarding managers.

Employee-Friendly Compliance and Risk Management

Depending on the kind of organization you run or work at, you will have more or less of a need to ensure its operations comply with various regulations and that you have risk management processes in place.

For many employees, this is a great cause of uncertainty and apprehensiveness. They are constantly asking themselves if what they’re doing is adhering to all the regulations that govern their industry.

This is why employee-friendly business process documentation on compliance and risk management is a must for any modern organization – it gives your employees an easy way to check and double-check everything they’re not quite sure about.

How Can Atlas UP Help?

Atlas UP makes the often-baffling compliance and risk management less frightening. After you’ve fed it all of your compliance and regulatory documentation, anyone at your company can ask simple questions that will give them ease of mind when tackling tasks that might have to do with various regulations.

For example, your HR team can simply ask, “How long can we keep the data on job candidates from the EU?”

Making Continuous Improvement Easily Achievable

Last but definitely not least, best practices for business process documentation have an almost paradoxical effect, where the presence of a documented process actually encourages modification and improvement.

Namely, the documentation of a process simplifies analyzing it as all the information is easily available. By monitoring the effectiveness of the process at different steps, your employees are more likely to find different ways to get better and improve not only their own performance but also how your company works, regardless of their seniority.

This neatly brings us back to Japan’s economic miracle, or, more precisely, Toyota. Namely, by introducing a Kanban approach to work, Toyota enabled any employee to suggest improvements to how the company is working.

We don’t have to tell you how that worked out for Toyota. It should be pointed out, however, that Toyota was able to do this because they had their processes figured out in the first place, as well as a way to document and implement improvements continuously.

8 Steps for Effective Business Process Documentation

Hopefully, by now, you are more than convinced that business process documentation is a must, and it is time to provide an outline for building your own. Please keep in mind that these are in no way written in stone and that you may find that you may wish to modify some of the steps.

That being said, these can safely be considered business process documentation best practices and you need to be careful not to overlook the basics.

1. Choose Your Documentation Strategy

There are a number of decisions that have to be made in order to choose your business process documentation strategy. For instance, do you go solely with traditional graphical representations, or are there operations that could be better documented in some other way, such as through video, guidelines, or checklists?

As you will most likely have to use traditional graphic representations for at least some of your process documentation, you should probably also decide on the syntax you will be using. The syntax in this context relates to standards for business process modeling, such as:

• Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)
• Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT)
• UPN (Universal Process Notation)
• Event-driven process chain (EPC)

Business Process Modeling Standard

Pros

Cons

Major Adopters

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)

• Globally adopted
• Understandable for non-process people
• Standardized for use across industries
• Can lead to complex process representations
• Limited to modeling only business processes
• NASA
• Audi
• Allianz
• HSBC

Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT)

• Explicitly defines and makes visible dependencies
• Can handle large amounts of project data
• Can provide a probability of completing before a given time

• Can result in hundreds or thousands of activities and individual dependency relationships
• Not easy to scale down for smaller projects
• Network charts tend to be large and unwieldy
• NASA
• Boeing
• IBM

UPN (Universal Process Notation)

• Concise information
• Little to no training required
• Fewer elements
• Creates little to no ambiguity
• Not widely adopted
• Bad for illustrating complexities at the surface level
• Not supported by all BPM software systems
• Salesforce

Event-driven process chain (EPC)

• User-friendly operability
• Easy readability
• Clear visualization of the dependency
• Not suitable for creative and complex processes
• Monitoring activities is problematic
• EPC neglects the person performing the activity
• SAP
• Siemens
• BASF

These standards have their established syntax with standardized activities, events, gateways, artifacts and more. Choose one and apply it across the organization to make sure your process models are usable across the company.

It is just as important to think about your employees as they are the ones who will be consulting the documentation. For most companies, this means that the simpler you go, the better. You don’t want to put your employees in a situation where they have to spend months learning how to read documentation.

Furthermore, for each process, you need to make a decision on whether you take a top-down or a bottom-up approach.

• Top-down approach: Your focus is initially on the bird’s eye view, omitting granular step-by-step details. This approach is mostly used to establish a certain level of operational excellence and to provide transparency.
• Bottom-up approach: Your starting point is the detailed description of your process, and from there, you continue to integrate it with the wider landscape of your company. This approach is usually taken when a problem arises with an existing process or when it is necessary to quickly build a new one based on a newly-arisen issue.

2. Determine the Scope and Documentation Boundaries

The second step is to determine the scope and the boundaries for the documentation for a certain process. Sometimes, it does not need to be excessively granular and it can actually make it less understandable and usable for the people in your company.

It is best to start with the information that needs to be conveyed about a certain process. Additionally, understanding how various enterprise information management software solutions can support these processes is crucial. This ensures that your documentation is comprehensive and aligned with the best practices in enterprise information management.

For example, let’s say that your software development team has a process for prioritizing and fixing bugs in deployed code. While your documentation may need to include information about bug naming conventions, it probably does not need to include details about the proper steps that have to be taken to inform the HR team that a developer will be spending the next two days working on this bug.

3. Define Responsibilities

Another key step in business process documentation management is identifying stakeholders - people who will be involved. These should include the following:

• Process Modeler: The person with ownership of the documentation who will make all of the most important decisions and ensure that the documentation is maintained and updated when needed.
• Subject Matter Experts (SMEs): People from the departments affected by a certain process, usually managers from various departments
• Process Analyst or Consultant: The person with a high-level, methodical overview of the processes within your company; also someone who provides support for process management workshops and is responsible for quality standards
• Reviewer: A person with methodology and business acumen capable of assessing the processes; usually also the person who ensures process documentation is standardized across the organization.

The best way to approach this is to talk to the people at your company and see whether someone has experience with process documentation or whether someone might be interested in learning about it. The more people from your company you get involved with, the better.

How Can Atlas UP Help?

When you tie in your project management and HR tools with Atlas UP, you can easily look up information on who the right persons are for which jobs, who has worked on documentation in the past, in which capacity, and whether you can make this more optimized.

4. Collect Process Information

Once you have determined what your documentation should look like, what its scope will be, and who will handle which responsibilities, it is time to get your hands dirty collecting data pertinent to the process being documented.

This will include but not be limited to:

• Aims
• Triggers
• Steps
• Involved parties
• Resources
• Tasks
• Timelines

Tools That Might Help

Some of this information-gathering process may require direct communication with stakeholders and involved parties, while some of it can be done with data collection tools like Google Forms or Typeform.

How Can Atlas UP Help?

Atlas UP can also be used to find out specific details you will need to build your documentation, and it does this in the most natural way possible – asking questions and getting answers as if you would from an actual person.

5. Visualize Your Processes

Unless you have decided on a particularly “non-traditional” or barebones approach to documentation, such as videos or checklists, you will need to visualize the process in order to make it more understandable and easier to analyze and modify.

Depending on whether you decide to go with one of the standards for business process modeling or if you wish to make it less formal (this will usually depend on the size of your company), there are different business process documentation tools you can choose from.

Once again, it is all about your employees. Gauge what they are comfortable with. Talk to them, consult them. If you feel like you are going too complex and heavy with visualization, it might be time to pull back and reevaluate.

Tools That Might Help

For instance, if you have decided to use BPMN or one of the other standards we mentioned earlier, you will probably be best off with specialized tools such as Pegasystems (Pega), Appian, Bizagi, Camunda, or ADONIS. These tools are designed to specifically support various business process modeling approaches and standards, and, as such, their functionalities are perfectly suited for documentation based on those standards.

There are also tools that are not BPM-exclusive, and they might be better alternatives (read: simpler and more user-friendly). We are talking about tools like Lucidchart, Kissflow or Visio.

6. Define Key Related Assets

It is very rare to have a business process that is not in some way related to another process or assets that are not directly involved in the process you are documenting. Because of this, the next step is to define these key related assets. This will help you identify dependencies and give you a more comprehensive picture of your process architecture. Moreover, this will help you standardize your process documentation and avoid disruptive discrepancies.

Some of the important related assets may include:

• RACI-defined roles
• Organizational units
• IT applications
• Documents
• RACI roles

Typically, only the more advanced adoptions of business process documentation management will include defining key related assets and dependencies that fall outside of the specific process.

Tools That Might Help

In such situations, the chances are that you are already using specialized BPM tools such as Pega or Bizagi.

7. Check Syntax and Validate Modeling Guidelines

This step is also only necessary if you or your organization have adopted a standardized, formalized approach to business process modeling and documentation. Namely, as part of this step, you will need to review the documented processes against modeling guidelines and the established syntax to identify errors or missing information.

Tools That Might Help

The good news is that BPM software like ADONIS and Bizagi have validation functionalities that will help you with this.

It is also important to note that this step is optional for smaller organizations whose business process management is not as structured as this and that do not use a business process modeling standard.

8. Get Feedback and Finalize Your Flows

Before a piece of documentation is published, it has to undergo a final review, which starts with getting feedback from stakeholders and process specialists. Once they are finished with their reviews, you will need to analyze their feedback and make necessary adjustments. From there on, you can finalize the documentation and publish it to the rest of the organization.

Tools That Might Help

The easiest way to support this step with technology is to use collaboration tools like Confluence or SharePoint for feedback collection. Of course, nothing can quite replace good old-fashioned in-person communication, so, if possible, try to broker a workshop where you can collaborate on the finalization step.

How Atlas UP Can Help With Business Process Documentation?

At this point, you are probably asking, “What can Atlas UP do for me?” when building process documentation. We have already mentioned a number of uses for Atlas UP when we covered individual steps.

But if you are interested in specifics, Atlas UP can be used as step number nine – enabling company employees to find the right documentation or parts that they need at any given point. They simply ask the question, and AtlasUP pulls the required information from existing documentation.

If you are involved in creating business process documentation, book a demo with us and find out more about how Atlas UP can assist you.

Conclusion

Documenting business processes may feel like bizspeak and something that companies do to make the lives of their employees more difficult unnecessarily. If done the wrong way, this might even turn out to be the case.

However, if you follow our advice and use AtlasUP to further humanize your business documentation process, you will discover that making process info available to your employees will actually help them feel less anxious, more empowered, and more likely to show initiative.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the examples of business process documents?

Policies, guidelines, business process models, standard operating procedures, training manuals, process maps and flowcharts are just some of the examples of business process documents.

What should be included in process documentation?

Process documentation should include the following elements: process overview, scope and boundaries, process steps, roles and responsibilities, inputs and outputs, visual representations, key metrics, exceptions and variations, and related documents and assets.

How to best document a business process?

To best document a business process, define objectives and scope, identify stakeholders, gather information, document step-by-step instructions, use visual aids, review and validate, maintain and update.