Well, for many employees, it’s the path of least resistance and "unless you are going to threaten me with my job, I won’t be opening that document and trying to figure out what all that stuff is trying to tell me in any sort of hurry". It might as well be written in Arabic!

I’ve found it’s quite common in business to find employees using precious new process documentation as door stops, desk levelers, and toilet paper (depending on the texture and weight). But why? Why is a new process that can potentially help the business make more money or run more efficiently be so hard for employees to accept and learn? Management and leadership issues aside, my own research has found that such documents are unwieldy and simply not suited to the modern PC based work place.

In our modern world of knowledge and communication we use computers and the Internet for the majority of our work and production and it’s only increasing. To have to find the correct document, prop it up somewhere beside your monitor, then work through each page that is deemed relevant, is simply a pain. And not only is it a pain but it is wasteful! Some process documents use a lot of ink, paper and plastic and to have them collecting dust in a back-office room defeats the purpose of the whole exercise.

Current business process documentation is simply not designed for the "customer" - the person who needs to learn the process as fast as possible and perform the process accurately. This major flaw is a key reason why process re-engineering and improvement projects completed by businesses have such a poor success rate. They just don’t "do it" for the people doing the work.

Jason