Procedures... Art, science or black magic?

by Elliott Lander

Procedures... Art, science or black magic? If you manage, write or care for procedures, this stuff's for you, and I want to get your opinions and experiences.

For some, procedures are a necessary evil... for others they are absolutely business critical. Do you know that the vast majority of industry procedures are authored in MS Word? That many produce procedures just in case the compliance police come and audit, but aren't used by real people?

Did you know that the number one complaint by procedure writers is how much time is required to format and re-format documents? In many cases, 50-75% of a writers time is wasted formatting.and that's each and every time they have to touch the document and make changes. Technology innovations, such as SmartProcedures (www.smartprocedures.com) take away the formatting misery and helps to produce higher quality procedures faster.

Technology allows humans to do what humans do best (quality content) and let computers do what computers do best (format, data management, analysis, etc...).

It's time for a new paradigm in procedure development!