Create, Use, and Continuously Improve Written Guidance for Repetitive Tasks and Processes

What do I mean by written guidance? Written guidance has many names and comes in many forms. Other terms include best practices, bulletins, checklists, guidelines, mini-manuals (Galler 2009), tips, templates, protocols, and standards. (See the caveat later about using the term “standards.”) The label or format aside, the intent of written guidelines is to capture the current cumulative knowledge and experience of an organization’s personnel. Write it down and widely share it and then, once it is understood and applied, continuously improve it.

In my consulting work and management experience, I have noticed a tendency for individuals and organizations to strongly resist preparing, using, and continuously improving what I refer to as written guidance. Two principal arguments against written guidance typically arise. The first is that preparing the written guidance takes too much time. Although an initial significant investment of thoughtful time is necessary, the reward will be a great return on that investment because of the many benefits that flow from written guidance. The second argument is that written guidance stifles creativity/innovation. On the contrary, implementing written guidance for routine, repetitive tasks and processes frees up personnel to collaborate, create, and innovate. Other objections to written guidance include concern with maintaining job security, writer’s block, and not fully understanding the why and how aspects of a task or process.

Nevertheless, my experience as a manager in government, business, and academic organizations and as an independent consultant has convinced me that written guidance yields benefits far in excess of the “costs.” Consider the experience of Michael LaVista, chief executive officer of the Chicago-based firm Caxy, a technology and web applications development company. Organizational inefficiencies motivated him to start corporate procedure documentation or, in other words, written guidance. Listen to him:

The written procedures have helped things run much more smoothly. Now when something happens, people turn to the document first. And if that gets them 80% of the way to a solution before they come see me, that’s time I don’t have to waste. And then I can go back and add a little more information to get the procedure closer to 100%. (LaVista 2010)

Henry Ford experienced opposition to what he called “standardization.” He said, “If you think of ‘standardization’ as the best you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow, you get somewhere. But if you think of standards as confining, then progress stops.”

A 2006 Project Management Institute (PMI) survey of 1,365 nontrainer/nonconsultant PMI members from around the globe indicated that only 24% of the surveyed organizations use written guidance throughout (PMI 2007). My experience reflects these survey results. However, the survey demonstrated that those who do use written guidance perform better. If you or your team, department, or organization do not use written guidance and are not receptive to the idea, is this one study sufficient to cause you to at least experiment with written guidance? Probably not.

Speaking of experiments, in 1927 the Western Electric Company at its Hawthorne plant in Illinois attempted to discover the effect of incentives on workers’ production. At first, to their delight, as incentives were increased, production went up. But, somewhat to their dismay, when incentives decreased, production still climbed. This later became known as the “Hawthorne Effect.” Production increased because workers were made aware of what they were doing and naturally found better ways to do it. Their point of view was changed; they were not just working but participating in a worthwhile experiment (Nierenberg 1996). Being more aware of what we are doing and ways to improve our performance and efficiency is one benefit of preparing, using, and continuously improving written guidelines. Even though these examples may not pertain directly to whatever you and your organization do, perhaps the PMI data, the Hawthorne Effect, and further evidence presented in a later section will cause you to give thought to implementing written guidance for repetitive tasks and processes.

As a result of creating, using, and continuously improving written guidance, an organization and its members will derive the following nine long-term benefits (Walesh 2012):

If you are still not convinced of the value of written guidance, then consider the results of a study from the medical profession in which checklists (one form of written guidance) were used in surgery (Gawande 2009; Wilson 2010). Under the sponsorship of the World Health Organization (WHO), medical professionals developed a 19-step surgery checklist. The three parts were before anesthesia, after anesthesia but before incision, and at the end of operation before the team wheels the patient from the operating room. The checklist was tested at eight hospitals around the world, and surgery results were compared before and after its use. The amazing results: major complications were down 36 percent, deaths down 47 percent, and infections decreased by almost half.

In a similar manner, 100 Michigan intensive care units experimented with a checklist for handling catheters because of concern over deaths caused by bloodstream infections. The results: infections were reduced by two-thirds and 1,500 lives were saved in 18 months (Saelinger 2012).

Atul Gawande (2009), the author of The Checklist Manifesto, which describes the surgery checklist study, wrote, “The checklist gets the dumb stuff out of the way, the routines your brain shouldn’t have to occupy itself with.” This prompts me to ask two questions:

If your answer to the two questions is even a tentative yes, give checklists or, more generally, written guidance a try.

Gawande also notes that checklists improve outcomes with no increase in skill. That’s a thought for those of us who, when an operational problem arises, may immediately focus on the need for more education and training. Maybe instead we should make more use of checklists or other forms of written guidance. The author shared an anecdote from surgery that indicated members of a surgical team favor checklists because “they improve their outcomes with no increase in skill” (Gawande 2009).

By the way, aircraft pilots routinely use checklists. This includes Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles on January 14, 2009, when they safely landed an Airbus with 155 people on board in New York City’s Hudson River. They ran through routine checklists at LaGuardia Airport before starting the plane’s engines. And, after takeoff, as soon as the impact with geese stopped the plane’s two engines, First Officer Skiles reached for the how to relight the engines and ditching checklists (Gawande 2009).

A word of caution is in order. Although written guidance has many benefits, as described, it could increase liability exposure in litigation. Therefore, be prudent. For example, if you and your organization are using, or will be experimenting with, written guidance, don’t call your new documents “standards.” Instead, use one of the other terms noted earlier. Reason: Possible confusion, if litigation occurs, with the “standard of care” concept.

Assume your organization does call the written guidance “standards” and that your organization is the defendant in a liability case and you are testifying. The plaintiff’s attorney says, “Are these your standards?” You answer is yes. “Did you use them on this project?” Your answer: “Not entirely, they are guidance.” The attorney’s assertion: “Oh, so you did not adhere to the standard of care.” Written guidance should include appropriate disclaimers and be used prudently. If intelligently applied, the benefits of written guidance greatly offset the disadvantages.

To conclude this discussion of creating, using, and continuously improving written guidance as a means of achieving quality, consider an observation from the book If Only We Knew What We Know (O’Dell and Grayson 1998). The authors write, “You would think … better practices would spread like wildfire to the entire organization.” And then they follow their observation with this blunt contrary statement: “They don’t.” Why? According to the authors, better practices are not systematically documented, widely shared, and continuously improved.

Is your team, group, or other organization making optimum use of its better practices? You know you have them. However, having them for the benefit of a few and leveraging them for the benefit of many are two very different situations.