Overview
The design, development and implementation of appropriate policies and procedures are essential for your organisation, or any other organisation for that matter, to ensure that your employees have direction and rules for performing their assigned tasks. They are also key resources for you for demonstrating compliance to standards and for certification.
You will have a number of different policies and procedures within your organisation, as well as other types of documentation.
The common thing about them all is that they must all reflect the way you work. One of the greatest mistakes that you can make is to adopt someone else’s documents and try to use them unchanged. They either do not work as they are not aligned with your business or they become the way that you work – which is often at variance with the way that you want to work.
This is also true for software that does not do exactly what you want it to do to meet your business goals and you have to adjust your ways of working to meet the requirements of some software that you have installed.
Sound corporate documentation is a start to implementing effective Management Systems. Some of the typical documents you should have, in hierarchical order, are:
- corporate vision;
- mission statement;
- business objectives;
- business values
- strategic plans for achieving the business objectives;
- policies
- procedures;
- work instructions;
- records providing proof that actions have occurred.
A variety of different documents are needed depending on your specific business requirements and no two businesses are exactly the same. When implementing any Management System, there are of course common requirements defined in the standard and a framework that has to be adopted for demonstrating conformance with the standard and for achieving certification.
Service Offering
FCL can assist you in the development of your business documentation requirements. Our technical authors have all achieved ‘Lead Auditor’ status in their chosen Management Systems and have many solid years of developing and implementing documented processes and procedures and they can be used for this purpose in your business.
The exact documents that we can deliver will depend on your specific requirements, but typically the majority of work we do for our Clients is the production and maintenance of procedures and training employees in their implementation and use.
Approach
No matter what documents you want produced or updated, the FCL approach is the same:
- agree the deliverables with you;
- identify relevant owners (document, process, etc);
- agree document delivery template(s) and format(s);
- review what ever documents exist that are relevant;
- work with your employees to identify process and procedures currently followed (typically by interview, observation and questioning)
- produce initial draft;
- submit for review;
- address any review comments;
- resubmit for review and iterate this process until the final version is agreed;
- develop training to support documentation, if required;
- publish document appropriately and undertake training, if needed.
Benefits
Some of the benefits of using FCL to develop your documentation are:
- ability to deliver in the most effective and efficient media for your organisation;
- accessibility of information within your documentation;
- consistency of documented processes across your whole organisation;
- errors are avoided because of accurate, clearly-written procedures.;
- essential in the case of invoking your corporate Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery Plans;
- experience in production of documentation for a variety of organisations and industry sectors;
- free up your employees to carry on with their core tasks whilst their processes and procedures are documented;
- minimised disruption to your employees;
- reduce support costs as answers are to be found in comprehensive documentation;
- reduce time to ‘get up to speed’ with new processes or tasks;
- solid experience in delivering documentation to met UK government requirements (e.g. JSP 440, RMADS, HMG SPF etc);
- solid experience in delivering documentation to private sector organisations;
- solid experience in knowing what documents Management Systems require;
- standardised templates for document creation.
- training that is more effective because of high-quality documentation;
Next Steps
- FCL are justifiably proud of our 100% SUCCESS RATE, of achieving first time certification through an Accredited Certification Body for our Clients;
- FCL is committed to providing a consistently high value service to our Clients;
- David Lilburn Watson, who remains personally ‘hands-on’ throughout the process, manages this process.
- to understand how the FCL suite of offerings can be used to transform your business, please contact us
- we look forward to discussing your specific requirements, at your convenience;
- whatever other type of consultancy you require, we can possibly offer a free Health Check.