How to overcome operational chaos?
Organizational chaos happens when there is no intentionally thought-through process on how you work.
It leads to making the same decisions multiple times, badly delegated tasks leading to badly delivered results, or simply just spending too much time on finding things.
In a distributed company, the intention starts with a documentation habit. Clearly organize all your knowledge and host it on your company hub. The second step is to, based on those documents, automate the workflows.
But we are not there yet.
Today I'll cover the process of starting a habit of documentation and how to structure your knowledge to bring more clarity, understanding, and indirectly better efficiency for your team.
How to start?
Every first step is hard, but you must avoid Google Drive and other non-flexible tools.
To process has 5 steps that are built upon each other.
Archives.
Support documents.
Action plans.
Manuals and guides.
Policies.
It starts with archives.
The best way to start a documentation habit is to record and transcribe your meetings.
Before you panic, there are AI tools that do that for you. Hit a button, and the document will be at your disposal at the end of the meeting.
— Here is a guide to master archiving.
Then, create support documents from the archives.
Meeting notes, supporting documents for project kick-offs, you name it. The goals with these are to provide background information, plus, collecting all considered ideas.
Imagine the situation: you had a meeting on product feature planning. You've written meeting notes on it. There were 2 development roadmap ideas, and you went with the A version. A month later, A version turned out to be a dead end.
How easy it is to just look back on the idea behind the B version and not have another meeting on moving forward with the dead end.
— Here is a really clear 8-step guide on how to be a pro on support documents.
— And here is a ready-to-use template for a meeting summary, the backbone of support documents.
The next step in the structure is the action plan.
You create the action plans from the support documents. These are short, actionable documents, essentially team-delegation manuals.
Who is doing what, how, why, and when? These documents define the focus or the scope of the work. If anyone has any questions during the process, fall back to the action plan, you have all the answers there.
— Here is a step-by-step guide on how to write an action plan.
— And here is my template for a super simple action plan, ready to use for you.
The next stage is a guide or manual.
These are long-form content and detail how you do certain things.
Guides are amazing for onboarding. If you have someone who's joined newly, give them the guides on XYZ, and they get up to speed really quickly.
Ditch orientation meetings and have Q&A meetings instead. They are much more useful but work only if you have guides for everything.
The last step is policies.
They are no-questions-asked short manuals on certain aspects of work. How do you communicate externally? How do you have a meeting? Things like that.
Policies are great because they synthesize the most important information into Do This If processes.
— Funny, but here is a guide on how to write guides and policies.
There you go. It all starts by recording your meetings. Then you build up from there.
Of course, the real magic happens when you have all of these piled up, hosted on a hub, and then... you start to automate workflows.
That's when you see the ROI, the time and resources saved, and the clarity it brings to your team.
Don't believe me? Hear Adam Nathan, CEO of Almanac, a documentation & workflow management tool, say it. We had a great talk on Leadership Anywhere show.
How do you structure your work?
Peter
