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In all likelihood, the task was completed only after either researching how to complete it and wasting time in doing so or by disrupting someone else to get them to explain.

Writing user manuals

With an operations manual, you avoid all that hassle and just get down to what you need to do, letting you make the most of your time rather than working at half-pace. Think of it as an employee knowledge base — a place that anyone can go to when they have a question or need something explaining, rather than bothering somebody else. One of the biggest advantages of having an operations manual is that it forces you to have fully documented processes for every task you do more than once.

This might sound like a pain to set up, but the long-term benefits for having them are massive.

Aside from increasing your efficiency and highlighting problems in your current processes, the consistency your business achieves is at the core of why processes are important. By having an operations manual to store your SOPs and important internal data, you can easily onboard new employees and identify the factors limiting your ability to scale. Not only that, but having documented processes in the first place will mean that your operation runs with less wasted time and money, making it able to rapidly expand.

A major part of reducing human error is to making everyone accountable for their actions.

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You could document your processes, hierarchy, job descriptions, emergency procedures, and more all without creating an operations manual. Admittedly, this will depend on the format of your manual. A physical file a book or folder will need to have items reprinted with corrections or potentially even a complete re-issue to avoid lengthy and confusing appendixes.

Digital operations manuals do not suffer the same problem, giving them an advantage over physical copies.

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Much like with an employee handbook, the challenge here is to include enough detail in your operations manual to serve as a comprehensive knowledge base for your team, but not so much as to bore them into complacency. For example, you could create a text document and use subheaders to separate the various teams, with a brief description of who reports to who.

General guidelines for user manuals

If the company hierarchy is a scannable chart, your job descriptions list is the information to back it up. While not necessarily job descriptions although fee free to use them , here you should be going through each role in your business and laying out their responsibilities, skills, who they answer to, and who answers to them.

In other words, give an overview of what the position is in more detail, but keep it in context of the hierarchy. If you need some help, check out our post on how to write a job description. Here you need to provide contact details for everyone in your company, and those outside who are in close contact.

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You could combine this part of the operations manual with the job description section if you want to have a more compact document, but having a separate list of contacts can make it easier to skim through and immediately get the correct information. Your documented processes will be the largest section of your operations manual, especially as your company grows.

Finally, any emergency procedures should also be stored in the operations manual. Okay, so you know what you need to include in your operations manual, but now you need to know how to go about creating it. You could use a word processor to create and print out physical copies and then store them in a file, but there are a couple of problems with that. Having to print out an entirely new manual or at least a chapter of it every time you update it is just as bad.

Unless you only print one copy at a time it will be difficult to recall every existing copy and replace them, leaving plenty of room for human error to sneak back in with an outdated manual. Instead, try using Process Street as your bpm software. When you begin to prepare instructions for processes you know inside and out, you will need to consciously take a step back and approach the material from a new angle.

Start at square one by assuming the audience will have zero knowledge of the subject matter. Make sure you know exactly what your manual needs to cover in order to avoid information overload or confusion that can come from too many details. This is especially important when the process is complex or has a lot of different parts. Before jumping in and creating steps, create a high-level outline of what the document will cover, including main and subsections. This will help you make sure your process makes sense and that each section of the manual is consistently structured.

Make it easy to understand: User manuals are used in many different kinds of environments: Here are some basic guidelines to ensure your user manual will survive actual use. Find out more on our 3-day, user experience immersion seminar. Philip Hodgson bpusability on Twitter has been a UX researcher for over 25 years.

His work has influenced design for the US, European and Asian markets, for everything from banking software and medical devices to store displays, packaging and even baby care products.

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