Whether you are responsible for knowledge of one department or the whole organisation, one of the more important tasks is to define your Process Hierarchy.
Depending on the nature of your business, you may choose to break processes into Customer Journey stages such as Sales, Service, Renewal and Cancellation – or you may consider breaking processes down to reflect the departments within your organisation such as New Accounts, Payments and Collections, Delivery, etc.
Generally there are five tiers of procedures, each getting more and more granular towards the task-level work instructions:
By understanding the landscape of processes within your organisation, you will be able to better map and document procedures, whilst making it easy for staff to quickly locate and memorise common tasks.
By segmenting your processes, you create better structure and ability to manage procedures by categories or function. It also helps when you build an Information Architecture (IA) for your Intranet or other Knowledge Software.
You may want to employ a Business Analyst or Technical Writer because having well-documented processes is an asset to any organisation.
Usually, most procedures grow organically for small to medium businesses. As your business grows, having a structured process hierarchy is essential.