The word disaster conjures up feelings of panic for nonprofits and business owners and as they fear the worst with this word, but let's be honest, most of these disasters are avoidable. The root of many disasters comes down to one other singular word:
communication.
Communication is the exchange of information between two parties and in a business environment these parties can be employee or client related. Communication can be written, oral, and sometimes even unspoken with the culture of a business. The best way to ensure efficient and effective business communication is through effective written documentation. Documentation of
business policies and procedures, technical drawings, and instructional manuals
ensures consistent adoption of the expectations of management within an organization. The documentation helps avoid disasters from a legal, operational, compliance, regulatory, and best practice points of view.
HOW WE CAN HELP
One of our clients was consistently having issues with employees being able to complete basic troubleshooting in their server room. Despite being trained several times by their on-call support team, there was little documentation that mirrored what the employee would see in the server room including labeled figures. The on-call support team had provided the manuals to the products that they had installed for our client but for the employees, who were not experts on the equipment, the equipment didn't resemble any of the documentation that they had been provided. This led to increased service calls and increased expense for our clients.
We were able to obtain the documentation from our client as well as some photographs of the actual space to develop a training manual that utilized digitized technical images of their actual server room along with an instructional manual to assist our client's employees with the basic troubleshooting issues. This project, although relatively short in nature, provided our client with a valuable service that has reduced the client's on-call support utilization and allowed the employees to more quickly locate issues and repair. This documentation has reduced overall support costs and improved the performance and confidence of the client's employees.
What small ways can we help you engineer greater operational efficiencies for your business or nonprofit?