5 Essential Steps to Documenting Your Systems.

How do you systematise your business?

It's a question many small business owners are challenged with.

Without documentation, “systems” are only rough ideas about the way you do things in your business.

Effectively, all your tasks, functions, processes and procedures - YOUR WAY - are nothing more than good intentions.

In other words, you must document all of your business processes.

You may resist that idea.

I often hear small business owners say ‘I don’t have time for that!’

But how often do you find yourself telling your employees how to do something?

Again and again and again?

What if you didn't have to do that anymore?

What if they just knew?

As a coach, it's not uncommon to hear my clients ask, "why can't people just get it?"

You hire people for their skills and experience and think they should be able to figure it out, right?

And the truth is, they will.

They'll create the systems that run your business either by accident or by design.

But they won't be your systems unless you transfer the knowledge of how you want things done, by creating and documenting those systems yourself.

The work of developing effective systems isn’t truly complete until they're captured, written down and made readily accessible in an effective and systematic fashion.

You need to have a plan for effectively documenting all the key routines you have in your business.

And you need to find a balance that works for you.

Since the work of systems documentation will be taking place concurrently with all of the regular daily tasks and operations of your business, it's vital to have a well thought-out strategy.

Allow sufficient time and resources from the start to prevent missteps down the road.

Here's an example of an approach that's worked well for many of my clients:

Review the business functions by separating the operations into categories.

Start by considering one department or operational unit of your business at a time.

List all of the key tasks, functions and procedures you can think of within that department - and enlist the help of your team.

The goal is to be as complete and comprehensive as possible.

Create a diagram of all the systems in your business: existing systems and those that need to be created.

Remember to identify all the systems that comprise your business, including systems you don’t have yet, but will need in order to achieve your vision for your business.

Typically, most of your systems will be in these three essential business processes:

You’ll also need to identify your administrative, human resources, finance and even information technology systems.

Based on your systems diagram, simply list all the systems on a spreadsheet that will become a working document for planning and controlling business development efforts for your business.

This will serve as the basis of your “master to do list” for systems documentation.

Prioritise based on the impact of a given system: How great is its impact on your customers, and how great is the impact on your business, your profit?

It's quite unlikely that you'll have the time, inclination, or even the ability to thoroughly document every system yourself.

A significant part of the strategy in this plan is in delegating some or most of this function to your manager(s) and / or team.

Make it a team effort.

And keep in mind that they too will have to complete this work while continuing to perform their other daily functions, in the ‘whirlwind’.

So, establishing clear target dates and benchmarks is a critical part of the success of this strategy.

This won’t happen overnight.

Baby steps!

Focus on the key systems that, once implemented, will have the greatest impact on improved workflow.

Do that and you’ll gain even more time to dedicate to system-development and strategic thinking.

It's important that you provide your team with a standard method for documentation, in order to make sure all your systems are represented consistently.

So, it's essential to start your team off with some samples - supported by training and timely feedback - to avoid wasted time and unnecessary frustration.

Systems aren't a silver bullet

Now that you have an idea for how to document your systems, there’s a very important caveat.

Systems and processes are essential to building and sustaining a great business.

But merely having those systems is not the solution for a dysfunctional business.

People are the power behind the systems.

The systems are their levers, not their replacements.

When your people have the freedom to find the most effective way to complete their job, not only will they take pride in their work, they’ll never stop making the systems better.

A great starting point to learn more about Systems is SYSTEMology, written by David Jenyns.

We also had David on our Quick Fire Podcast as our guest.

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