A Thought for the New Year: Today’s Documentation and Redundancy are Tomorrow’s Life Savers

January 28th, 2015
Written by: Elizabeth Richards

By the end of January, many a New Year’s resolution has fallen by the wayside. But I wanted to share an experience TPO had recently that could serve as one of the most impactful—albeit the least exciting—New Years resolutions for small- and medium-size organizations: Make time to document your most important processes. It’ll be a lifesaver at some point down the road.

Our story: Last Fall we hired a new Office Manager to handle a range of operational tasks and processes including billing. Now, as you know, you can declare in the job description that the candidate must have billing experience; you can screen candidates based on that criteria; you can ask in the interviews about their previous billing experience; and you can check references. But despite doing all the right things, every so often you’ll still end up with a new hire who cannot get up to speed. However, because we use our own data-driven new employee Onboarding process, we were able to detect this issue and others very early in the Office Manager’s tenure—and decided to part ways with her.

One of the factors that enabled us to be so decisive is that we have redundancy in billing (and other areas); we had already cross-trained a second employee on our billing process, and she had done the monthly billing before. There was no doubt she could handle billing until we found and trained a new Office Manager.

So when it was time to do billing for the following month, no problem, right? Well, just one: The employee who was cross-trained on billing was in the hospital! So did no Office Manager and no cross-trained consultant mean no billing that month? Not an option.

This is where documentation comes in. While we could not have anticipated this exact scenario, we did know that, given the importance of monthly billing and the chance that something could go sideways from a resource standpoint at any time, we had to have a backup backup plan. Which is why we had created detailed documentation of our billing process—so that anyone on our staff could step in in an emergency—like this one—and follow the instructions.

Redundancy and documentation are even more important in small- and medium-size organizations that don’t have layers of staff and management that can step in for each other. In an organization like ours—and perhaps yours—one missing resource can cause a train wreck.

So the takeaway—while perhaps not the most exciting business resolution you’ve read so far in 2015—is this: Don’t wait for an emergency to build redundancy and create documentation for your critical processes. By then it’s too late.