I was recently reading the interview with Denis Boltikov on Natalia Bryzgalova’s blog and came across an interesting passage:
First, there was no internal documentation. No job descriptions, no standards, no templates for setting tasks at the different stages of work, no checklists for quick reviews, no contracts with clients. Nothing at all. All of it has to be created from scratch.
I ran into exactly the same problem when my online store gradually began to move from the category of “my business, and I work in it” to the category of “girls, please do it like this”.
That is, at some point, right at the start of a business’s growth, you need to create a mechanism of internal procedures. Put simply, you have to settle who does what, and how.
Either business books don’t usually write about this, or I read them carelessly, or I read the wrong business books… Usually, once the business plan is written, you instantly get a big, well-oiled enterprise…
Perhaps this is exactly what building the notorious “business system” everyone talks about means…
In the early days you can successfully use Teamer, a wonderful tool for teamwork, and I’m endlessly grateful to its makers for building it. But Teamer suits day-to-day operational work; for formalizing the rules or principles of the work, not so much.
Right now I’m trying to pull all the existing instructions together. So far the best thing I’ve come up with is a simple table in Google Docs, grouped by area, with the columns Process, Owner, Instructions and Priority.
Besides that, you could try drawing a mind map, but I’m afraid it would come out too unwieldy. When I’m done, I’ll definitely write a post with recommendations on formalizing procedures in a business.
By the way, one of the lessons I have yet to learn goes exactly like this:
Lesson 9. Write down all the duties and areas of responsibility: let everyone know what’s expected of them.