POLICIES, RULES AND PROCEDURES 327
You will document all of these in varying degrees – keep them simple. Manifestations of
policies, rules and procedures that are possibly already on your company bookshelves
are listed opposite. You might want to make a list of handbooks and manuals that would
guide decision-making and activities in your business. It might be much shorter than the
list shown. Or it might be much more complex. (You could develop a plan for creating
these documents.)
A warning:
‘A person who is devoted to paperwork has lost the initiative. He is dealing with things
that are brought to his notice, having ceased to notice anything for himself. He has been
essentially defeated in his job.’
PROFESSOR C. NORTHCOTE PARKINSON
It is a delight to be able to generate standard policies and procedures. In particu lar, get
the procedure right, do it the same way every time, and the result is always consistent and
as expected. This applies equally to processing customer orders, setting up manufactur-
ing equipment, approving credit applications, etc.
Procedures make it easier for the next person, simplify staff training, are the basis for
quality systems (such as promoted by the international standards organisation ISO) and
– most important – help you please the customer. They do not, as human-resources-
Luddites might suggest, take away employee dignity or creativity. Quite the opposite,
procedures are the underlying framework that free resources for better things and – as it
happens – create stability and consistency as a basis for standards and the ultimate repu-
tation of your business.
We do not need to discuss this much further. You have probably spotted where I am
heading. The finest business plan would be one that could be taken to the point where
instructions it contains are phrased in terms of follow procedure A, B, C, etc. You really
could play golf all day if your business was this well planned. Or at least, you could once
you had decided who would execute the procedures.
Procedures develop from your business plan in the following way.
1 Set policies that guide activities – someone has to lock up at night.
2 Develop rules – the last person to leave will set the alarm.
3 Create procedures – such as shown in the six steps above.