Your Process Has a Name and a Phone Number - The SPRIITE Series/Article 3 of 9

Almost every company I have worked in or advised has at least one person whose absence is an operational event. Things stop working correctly until they get back, and nobody can fully explain why.

At one company it was a woman in scheduling. When she took two weeks off, the shop ran fine for four days and then began quietly falling apart, because the sequence she used to reconcile three systems that did not talk to each other existed nowhere except in her practice. She had never been asked to write it down. She had never thought of it as a process. To her it was just how you do the job.

That is the second of the seven conditions. Process asks whether the methods behind the work that matters are written, current, in use, and worth repeating. Most companies fail it in one of three specific ways, and the three have different fixes.

Failure one: it was never written

The first failure is the obvious one. The method exists only in practice, carried by whoever does it most, and nobody has ever written it down.

Owners underestimate how much of the company runs this way, because the work is getting done. A process that lives in a competent person's head produces good output right up until that person is out, promoted, overloaded, or gone. Then the company discovers the difference between a process and a person, and the discovery is expensive.

The tell is easy to find. Ask which three steps determine whether your most important thing happens correctly, then ask to see where those steps are written. In most small and midsize companies, at least one of the three is not written anywhere.

Failure two: it went stale

The second failure happens to companies that did the work. Documentation gets built well, the business grows, the methods change with it, and the record stays where it was. Within a year the team has stopped referring to it, because it no longer describes how anything actually gets done.

The cause is almost always the same. Somebody was responsible for creating it and nobody was responsible for keeping it true. The fix is to assign every documented process to a specific manager and put a review on the calendar, quarterly for most companies, and to have that review ask whether the process still fits the business rather than only whether the steps are accurate.

I have written about this failure at length in a separate article, Process Documentation Is Harder Than It Looks, so I will leave it there. It is the most discouraging way to fail this condition, because it happens to the companies that took the advice seriously.

Failure three: nobody uses it

The third failure gets the least attention and kills the most initiatives. The documentation is written, it is current, and the team does not use it.

Teams do not adopt new methods automatically. They need training, context, and consistent modeling from leadership until the new way becomes the habitual way. That work is repetitive and unglamorous. It is the same conversation held more times than feels necessary, plus the willingness to notice out loud when someone has quietly gone back to the old way. Most implementations struggle here, and it rarely looks like a failure. It looks like the initiative just sort of tapered off.

A documented process still has to be a good one

Everything above is about whether a method is written, current, and used. There is a prior question that scoring this condition has to cover, and companies that get serious about documentation sometimes skip it.

Is the work itself efficient? Do tasks land with the people best suited to do them? Is there enough transparency that when something goes wrong you can see where? And does the process actually reduce errors, or does it mainly produce a record of them?

A company with immaculate, current, fully adopted documentation of a wasteful process has not scored a four. It has written down a two. Document the method, and then ask whether the method deserves to be repeated.

Scoring process honestly

A two looks like this. The methods that matter live in individual heads. What documentation exists is more than a year old and no one has read it recently. When someone is out, the team improvises.

A four looks like this. The handful of processes that determine your results are written, each has a named owner, each was reviewed within the last quarter, the work inside them is efficient enough that nobody routes around it, and new people are trained from the documents rather than by shadowing whoever is free.

Notice what a four does not require. It does not require documenting everything, and companies that try usually produce a large amount of material nobody maintains. Document the processes that determine whether you deliver, get paid, and keep customers. Let the rest live in practice until it matters.

I have been the person who thought documentation was a compliance exercise, and I have paid for that opinion in companies I was responsible for. If a two-week absence would put your company at risk, you do not have a staffing problem to solve this month. You have a process that never got written and an owner who was never named. And if you want help deciding which processes actually matter, my door is open.