The handbook of your firm, an operations handbook serves as the foundation of your enterprise. Your employee handbook may expose your team to your mission, different regulations, and culture; but, the operations manual will outline how to perform each task and provide all the necessary resources.
The handbook often consists of a printed book or folder with all of your standard operating procedures, your hierarchy, contact information, and emergency protocols. An employee can consult the manual whenever they need to know how to perform something.
You must now understand the steps involved in producing it.
Here is how to write an operations manual for your company.
Choose the platform for your manual
You must first decide how you will write your operations manual. There are a few issues with using a word processor to make and print out physical copies, then store them in a file.
It’s almost as annoying to have to print out a brand-new manual each time you update it. It will be challenging to recall every existing copy and replace them unless you only print one copy at a time, giving lots of potential for human error to reappear with an out-of-date handbook.
Use Process Street as your bpm software as an alternative. You can document your processes to run as useful, actionable, trackable workflows by either building your own template or selecting one of our predefined ones. Additionally, everything you produce has adjustable permissions that restrict access to to those who really need it, safeguarding your private data.
You may also access your processes whenever you have an internet connection by having them in a central location. You may even print your processes from Process Street if you truly want to have a hard copy to distribute, doing away with the one benefit an application like Word would have.
Set a consistent layout
The platform you use to produce the manual will have a big impact on how you set up the layout, but the most crucial thing is that it remains consistent throughout the entire thing.
The simple details you need to consider while using a word processor include the typeface you’ll use, how you’ll divide each section, whether you’ll add photographs or screenshots, etc.
While utilising Process Street, you can organise your processes into subfolders after creating a folder to manage your operations manual. Then, processes may be connected, and workflow run links can be copied and pasted wherever you choose to make it simple to execute checklists while you’re engaged in other online activities.
Create your manual
It’s time to really write the operations handbook after you’ve defined its design. Document each of the aforementioned items as you go through them.
Working collaboratively with the rest of your team, or at the very least the managers of your various departments, is ideal. Everyone who will use the handbook will have been involved in its creation, increasing the likelihood that they will encourage regular use of it. Additionally, if you get the assistance of experts with more experience than you possess to help you document your procedures, the results will be much more accurate.
