As your company grows, your numbers will grow in a variety of ways. You’ll have more employees, customers, and income. You’ll also increase complexity and expose how much of your company runs on what only a few individuals know. Business process documentation captures that knowledge in a form the whole team can use. It supports consistent results, faster onboarding, and a company that keeps running even when a key employee is out of town or changes their career trajectory.
We’ve been working with business leaders for decades now. Like you, these leaders want to build their company on a firm foundation. One that supports exponential growth. This is done by process documentation.
Here are some of the most common questions that business leaders ask during their documentation journey. Read on to learn how to document business processes in a way that drives standardization, scalability, and implementation.
Where Should a Growing Company Start With Process Documentation?
Start with a short assessment of what you already have in place, your goals, and where the biggest gaps are located. Once that assessment is complete, you can create a roadmap that lists priorities, task ownership, and timelines.
Most leaders find they already have more processes in place than they realized.
However, these processes tend to live in people's heads, inboxes, and habits. Learning how to document business processes begins with drawing out that existing knowledge through conversations with the people who do the work.
Here are a few steps you can take to begin process documentation:
- List your departments.
- Note the tasks that each department performs weekly.
- Assign ownership of those tasks to the title under which they fall. For example, the Accountant would complete invoicing - not Mary. That way, if Mary is promoted, she doesn’t bring the invoicing task with her.
This list is the foundation of your process roadmap. From here, you can define your goals. Do you want to automate your invoicing system? Or maybe you want to shorten onboarding time. Your goal will guide your next steps.
Which Business Processes Should You Document First?
Document the processes that cause the most fires. These are usually the processes used by high-risk or high-volume areas.
If your business is running smoothly with few or no “fires,” then document tasks that only one person knows how to do. From there, you can document business processes that affect customers directly and workflows that generate frequent errors or questions. Those workflows usually involve interdepartmental handoffs.
A simple way to prioritize is to score each process on three factors:
- How often it runs,
- How costly a mistake would be, and
- How much it depends on a single person.
Processes that score high on all three factors should be at the top of the list.
Let’s say your operations manager is the only person who knows how to onboard a new client and the client has to wait if the OM is out of town. Or when someone else attempts to onboard the new client, the experience is rocky at best. That process would be near the top of the list.
How Much Time Does Process Documentation Require From Your Team?
Plan on roughly 2.5 hours per week from the people involved. That typically breaks down to 90 minutes of working sessions each week, plus an hour for reviewing drafts between meetings. Depending on your business size, this project could take up to three months. Working in department-sized pieces keeps the documentation process manageable and lets your team see finished results quickly.
Protect your team’s time by preparing beforehand. This could look like showing up to meetings prepared to answer questions. It could look like departmental time blocks that allow your team to focus on the project. Or it could mean hiring an outside facilitator like Business Success Consulting Group to handle interviews, writing, and formatting.
Making steady progress on the project is more effective for maintaining momentum than trying to complete it in one sprint.
Who Should Be Involved in Documenting Processes?
The short answer is that the people who know how to complete the process from start to finish should be interviewed first. These are the process owners, the subject matter experts, and the people who perform the work daily. They are also your team's “go-to” problem solvers.
They are also likely to be the busiest people on your team.
While the employees who know how to do the work are obviously necessary, leadership needs to be on board, too. The C-Suite must visibly support the effort and be involved. This is the best way to get the team to treat it as a priority task.
Assemble your list by:
- Listing all departments.
- Next to each department, name one person who is going to be accountable for the final version of the documentation.
- Next to that person, name someone who will be in charge of process implementation.
- Either list the people who hold the knowledge to be documented or get the accountable individuals to do so.
- Finally, name the C-Suite executives who will be involved with each department.
What If You Already Have SOPs and Documented Processes?
Existing SOPs (standard operating procedures) give you a head start! Here’s what to do:
- Gather your existing processes and SOPs,
- Review them for accuracy,
- Standardize them so they work well, look consistent, and are easy to use.
So many companies have process documents scattered across the company intranet, shared drives, personal folders, and even printed in dusty binders. These documents might be current - or they might lay out a process that the team used years ago. They also might contain nuggets of information that pertained to a specific campaign or older product. That’s why a review is so vital. You don’t want to lose useful knowledge, but you also want to create living documentation you can use today.
For example, your company may have run a successful marketing campaign during the holidays in 2018, and you find the documentation for this campaign. Reviewing it now may provide you and your team with great ideas for this year’s holiday campaign. But it’s not going to be immediately transferable to a 2026 campaign. So, you’ll need to extract the useful pieces and update the rest so that your team can use it this year, during this holiday season.
What If Your Business Processes Keep Changing?
Some business owners see business processes as static, but we argue that they are dynamic. A process is useful only if it's used. As we noted in the example above, documentation can provide a history of changes so you can keep the useful parts and update the rest.
Companies that are going through a period of growth and change often find that documented processes help them manage and reinforce that growth. This is because a written process gives you a baseline from which you can improve. Without one, changes happen chaotically, with different people ending up doing the same task in different ways.
When it’s all documented, your team can be on the same page and make changes in sync with one another. This provides both your customers and your team with consistency over growth periods.
Here’s a brief “how to” for building the opportunity for change into your process documentation system:
- Assign a version date to each document,
- Name the job titles that have authority to approve updates,
- Keep a change log,
- Log changes as they happen,
- Schedule periodic documentation reviews to implement these changes.
Process standardization is a living practice that should keep pace with your business.
How Do You Get Employees to Follow Documented Processes?
The short answer is: get leadership involved.
Showing that leadership is not only part of the documentation process, but also uses those processes, will go a long way toward getting employees to follow suit.
However, it’s more than just leading by example. A structured rollout method also helps. The team here at Business Success Consulting Group uses an eight-step approach. This covers training managers and staff, setting an adoption schedule, defining who is responsible for what, implementing systems training during onboarding, and adding checkpoints that confirm the procedure is in use.
Even in this rollout, though, leadership plays a central role.
Here are a few tips for getting your processes followed and implemented without a lot of back and forth:
- Introduce each new process in an open team session that includes a Q&A.
- Discuss and ask about SOP use during one-on-ones and team meetings.
- Make documents easy to find and use. This can be done by using checklists, screenshots, and short videos.
- Track and showcase metrics like error rates and onboarding time.
- Invite employees to take ownership of the project by suggesting improvements.
Over time, following the process will become part of the company culture.
How Do You Keep Processes Updated as the Company Grows?
Appoint a process champion and get regular reviews added to the calendar. The champion is a team member responsible for keeping documentation current, and the review schedule gives that person a rhythm to follow.
Your process champion should answer these questions during every review:
- Is the process still accurate?
- Have the tools or roles changed?
- Did any complaint or error point to a gap?
The process champion should complete these reviews quarterly and annually.
A quarterly review should focus on areas where processes need rapid updates, and an annual review can focus on more stable departments.
Additionally, it’s important to list actions that trigger an update. For example, new software would be a common trigger, as the entire process may need to be rewritten in affected areas. Without that update, the process will become useless.
Steady process maintenance protects the investment you made in the original documentation.
Where Should Your Processes and SOPs Be Stored?
Store your business processes and SOPs in one central platform that all employees can access easily. Choose a tool that is easy to access, simple to update, and organized so people can find what they need in seconds.
Look for these capabilities when choosing a platform:
- Search that rapidly returns the right document.
- Support for text, images, video, and audio.
- Permission settings so the right people can edit and everyone else can view/download for use.
- Version history so you can see what changed and when.
- Easy to organize by department, role, or workflow.
If your team already uses a platform that meets these criteria, keep using it. It’s much simpler to keep your team using familiar tools than to spring a new one on them. What matters the most is that your employees can find, access, and use the processes - and you can keep all content current.
Should You Document Processes Before Implementing New Software?
The short answer is: yes!
Documentation often leads to opportunities for further automation. So document your core processes, then choose the best software for your needs. That might be an automation software, something that is eminently intuitive, or a SaaS that lands somewhere in between.
When a company selects software before defining how work should flow, the software ends up shaping its operations. This means your company might lose aspects that make it unique as it tries to conform to an out-of-the-box model.
When you document first, you can list requirements, choose a platform that fits, and configure it to match your ideal operations. It also gives your implementation team a reference for training and testing.
The documentation step may also reveal other inefficiencies like duplicate data entry, unnecessary approvals, or dropped handoffs. Fixing these beforehand can save you time and money during migration.
Documenting your business processes gives your company a firm foundation from which to grow. It captures vital proprietary knowledge, sets explicit standards, supports scalability, and assists in rapid onboarding. If you would like help in supporting your next stage of growth, Business Success Consulting Group is here to help! We assist your team in documenting and refining scalable business processes so that your company can grow to the next level.
