Tag Archives: procedures

Case study: Creating an easy to use Listener Guide for the Samaritans and the Prison Service

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Through its Listener Scheme in prisons, Samaritans  provides  emotional support to prisoners who are struggling to cope, are self harming or are feeling suicidal.

Guidance for Samaritans volunteers that run and support Listener schemes was contained in a hard copy manual (the Guide to Prisons) which was cumbersome to update, difficult to navigate and not in a format that made it easy to share with prison staff. As a result, over the years, volunteers referred to it  less and less frequently meaning that consistency in delivery of the Listener scheme across the prison estate was being compromised.

Cherryleaf were tasked with converting the manual to a fully searchable, easy to use, online resource that would link to other relevant information on the Samaritans intranet and could also be made available on the Prison Service intranet. The new online Guide to the Listener scheme means that both Samaritans volunteers and prison staff have access to the same, up to date, comprehensive set of guidelines and information.

Maria Foster, Samaritans’ Prison Support Officer said:

“For Samaritans volunteers, having the information available on the intranet rather than in a manual in their branches, means they can find out what they need to know at any time; the search facility and page style ensures that information can be located and read quickly and easily.

For prison staff, this is the first time they will be able to see all of the Samaritans guidelines for running the Listener scheme; this will help to further develop their understanding of the scheme and will support them in facilitating the operation of the scheme in their prison.

Samaritans is delighted with the result of the project;

Cherryleaf understood the brief and very quickly got to grips with the subject matter, turning a cumbersome manual into a streamlined user friendly resource.”

 

The Samaritans provides confidential emotional support for people who are experiencing feelings of distress, despair or suicidal thoughts. You can talk to them, any time, on 08457 909090 (UK), 1850 60 90 90 (Republic of Ireland) or jo@samaritans.org .

How can growing businesses get past the 5 and 10 employee barriers?

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According to Dr Alan Rae, the number of companies in the UK that go from employing fewer than 10 to more than 10 in a year is only about 1600.

The reason, he explains, is that each new person hired adds another layer of relationships. By the time you’re up to about 12 or 13 staff, people issues gobble up all the owners’ time. The result is senior management don’t have the time to think about strategy.

A growing business that wants to grow will need to resolve this issue early on, probably when it hits the 4-6 employee mark. This is the really point when you need to start formalising and documenting your systems, processes and procedures.

You don’t want to lose the agility that’s made the business successful, so how can you keep agile and formalise the business?

One approach is to document your processes and procedures in a way that’s as agile and nimble as your business:

  • Use  professional business writers (such as Cherryleaf) who can capture critical (but missing) information and improve existing content. You can use them to  take your “brain dumps”, talk to others, look at what documents exist, and turn that into information that communicates your message clearly and simply.
  • Use software that makes it straightforward to both get to the information that staff need and keep it up to date. There’s software you can use that costs as little as $10/year.
  • Embed the information into the systems that staff use, so it’s always to hand.

With measures like these in place, you’re more likely to have a scalable business with fewer growing pains.

See also

Cherryleaf featured in Data Quality Pro Journal – improving Healthcare data quality through policy and procedure management

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Data Quality Pro logoIn Data Quality Pro Journal, Dylan Jones interviews Ellis Pratt, Director at Cherryleaf, about how to improve Healthcare data quality through policy and procedure management. According to Dylan,

“One of the single most common root-causes of poor information quality is outdated documentation and a lack of governance in the way policies and procedures are managed. Nowhere is this more critical than in the healthcare sector.”

Ellis shares a range of practical techniques and methods to help improve policy and procedure documentation within the healthcare sector.

Article – How to improve Healthcare data quality through policy and procedure management.

See also:

Webinar  21 November 2012 –  Writing policies and procedures: The most common issues, and how to fix them

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We will be hosting a free 60 minute webinar called “Writing policies and procedures: The most common issues, and how to fix them” on Wednesday 21st November.

Registration is now open - Register Here

Places are limited.

Case Study: Samaritans procedures clarified and put online

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Samaritans is a charity that provides confidential emotional support 24/7 to those experiencing despair, distress or suicidal feelings. The service is provided by over 20,000 volunteers from 202 branches.

The Samaritans Operations Manual explains in detail the policies and processes which volunteers must follow when delivering the service. This new online manual will replace four paper manuals and will be accessible in every branch by every volunteer. Cherryleaf has provided conversion and editing services so that Samaritans can make the manual available online through its intranet.

Miriam Piterkova, Samaritans’ Operations Officer, said:

“The Samaritans Operations Manual will be one of the most important resources volunteers use to support them to deliver our service. For the first time, all the information they need will be in one place. This will make it so much easier for volunteers to find what they need quickly.”

The manual will be written in such a way that volunteers can skim through it, or read every detail. It will be stored on the Samaritans intranet and be fully searchable. It is written in plain English and version-controlled, so it will be always up-to-date.

The new Operations Manual has been uploaded onto the Samaritans intranet, and has been reviewed by Regional Officers and the Quality and Visitors group. It is now being reviewed by the branches prior to its official launch later this year.

The Samaritans are also in discussions with Cherryleaf about turning other manuals into online resources.

Creating franchise operations manuals that are customisable and controlled

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Creating an operations manual is a key part of franchising any business, as it helps ensure each franchisee is operating in the way that made the original, franchised, business successful in the first place. You want reliable, repeatable, consistent performance from every franchised location.

However, it’s often the case that there needs to be slight variations between each franchised location. The challenge is, how can this be reflected in the operations manual?

For example, let’s say a company called Doner-Summa decides to franchise its business selling turkish doner pizzas and have franchises in Leeds (in the UK) and Dublin (in Ireland). It wants to have standard operating procedures in the case of a fire, but it has the challenge that the layout of each store is different, as is the emergency telephone number between the two countries.

The solution is to create a franchise operations manuals where certain sections are controlled centrally by the franchisor, and where other sections can be customised to reflect the particular situation of each franchisee:

When the Leeds branch adds its content to its operations manual, it contains important and specific information relevant to their situation. In this case, the location of the fire alarms and the evacuation point:

The Dublin branch operations guide looks similar, but the building diagram and the emergency number are different:

With this approach, Doner-Summa has not passed over all control of the manual to the franchisees. It still has the ability to make iterative improvements to the processes and procedures from the centre.

Let’s say, for example, Doner-Summa discovers the procedure states people should contact the operator, when they should contact the fire brigade. It can make a change to the centrally controlled core procedure, and this change will auto-magically be inserted into all the franchisees’ versions of the guide.

Change made to the core procedure here:

Results in the franchisees operations manuals being automatically updated to reflect the change:

Of course, any printed versions of the operations guide will only be updated when a new version of the guide is printed out by the franchisee. However, it’s possible for an automatic notification email to be sent out to every franchisee whenever the core content has been amended. Also, any online or  tablet versions of the manual will have been updated in real time.

Note: Turkish pizzas do exist in Germany. They are donor kebabs wrapped in a burrito-type bread instead of pitta bread. Doner-Summa is not meant to reflect any existing business with the same or similar name.

Writing clear policy documents

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Clear policies and procedures can have a profound effect on any organisation; they ensure that people know what they are doing, systems work properly and the people within the organisation are confident that the information in the policies and procedures is accessible, easy to understand and current.

However, writing clear policy documents can be very difficult to do.

Before you can write a good policy, you need clear decisions on which to base your writing. If the organisation doesn’t have a clear sense of what it wants to do, you as the writer will be compromised – there is only so much you can do with confusing or incomplete information. Policymakers must agree on policy before you, the writer, can write the policies.

You must also decide on your audience – whom you are writing for. The answer is often, our policy is for everyone, they all need to read and understand it. However, this means you have to write a document that must address multiple audiences with different agendas.

The temptation is to write policy documents primarily for those who audit the policies, which means the documents are often written in the passive voice. The problem with that is it can cause  a reader to become a passive spectator – they don’t ‘get’ what they are expected to do. The rules here is simple:

  • Imagine the least experienced user and write for that person.
  • Write primarily for those who need to use or implement the information.

Policies and procedures should always accomplish something – never write a policy or procedure just because it seems like a good idea. Very often policies and procedures can be knee jerk reactions to an incident. Somebody makes a mistake and someone else says “we should put a policy in place in case it happens again”.

You need to be a ruthless editor to avoid repetition and confusion across a myriad of documents. Break information down into ‘chunks’ or ‘topics’, with each topic containing one subject with a specific purpose, and then refer to (or embed) that topic in the other documents.

We’ve been working on a project to simplify policy documents within an NHS Trust. It’s a challenge simplifying a set of complex interlocking documents, but the results can be striking – helping staff understand why they should do things in a certain way and what the organisation is aiming to achieve.

The guilty pleasure of writing policy and procedure documents

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We have a number of projects running at the moment that involve us improving organisations’ policy and procedures documents. It may not seem likely, but these projects are enormous fun.

The best analogy I can find is that it’s like rearranging someone else’s record collection. Or in a more modern setting, it’s like creating a playlist from someone else’s mp3 files. Everything ends up in order, or as Hans Christian Anderson said, “everything in the right place”.

The trick with policy and procedures documents is to break them in to small chunks of information, each of them preceded by a heading that describes the topic. The key factor is: each topic must only contain the information described by the heading. This activity results in the equivalent of a big bag of lego bricks – giving you, as your next step, the pleasant task of connecting and arranging all these topics into the right order.

To work in this modular, object, based way it’s best to avoid tools that take a more linear approach, such as Microsoft Word. We’d recommend, instead, you use a ‘modular’ authoring tool that enables you to generate a Word or PDF document once you’ve finished.