Customer Reviews

7 Steps to Better Written Policies and Procedures

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"7 Steps to Better Written Policies and Procedures" clearly states that you are proactively listening to the voice-of-the-customer!!!

1. While there are dozens of books on policies and procedures, this book is clearly the best choice for policy and procedure authors.

2. It's new, state-of-the-art, brief, to-the-point, and has everything authors need to know for formatting policies and procedures.

3. While his writing style is dynamic enough to enable cover-to-cover reading, it's modular enough to serve as a desktop reference that facilitates starting at any point within the textbook.

4. More importantly, however, are the technical strong points, which include concise formatting, style, content, presentation, appearance, prose, structure, and completeness (not to mention several comprehensive examples).

5. The author's book authoritatively defines the 7 important elements of all policies and procedures: purpose, revision history, persons affected, policy, definitions, responsibilities, and procedures (with a complete chapter dedicated to each of the 7 areas)

6. Each chapter has a highly structured approach which includes sample templates, purpose, format, common mistakes, scenarios, what to look for, exercises, answers, and pit falls to avoid.

This book is bound to re-energize, re-invigorate, and provide desperately-needed guidance to an otherwise chaotic field of policy and procedure-writing amateurs and novices.

Many kudos to this author, thanks, and I am hoping he continues his legacy to revolutionize the field of policy and procedure writing ...

-David F. Rico-

This book is fine if you are looking for a guide to create a Policy & Procedure manual where the procedures are at a high level. You should, however, look elsewhere if you are looking for a guide on how to write clear, easy-to-use procedures. The format for the procedures in this book is similar to the technical writing style of 20 years ago and is not suitable for procedures that will actually have to be followed by the end-user. You should look to Nancy J. Campbell's "Writing Effective Policies and Procedures," Blake & Bly's "The Elements of Technical Writing," or an Information Mapping seminar if you are interested in creating "user-friendly" procedures.

I borrowed my copy of this outstanding book when I was tasked to write policies and procedures for my department. Although other reviewers have recommended reading the author's earlier books if you've never written policies and procedures I was able to quickly produce detailed documents that my staff assured me were clear and effective. I attribute my success to the easy to follow steps that Mr. Page gives, and the logical structure that he recommends.

You can't go wrong if you use this book as a guide for policy and procedure writing. It's like a cookbook in many ways, with a clearly laid out recipe for success and a list of ingredients that will be required in the form of steps and item blocks for your documents.

I was so impressed with this book that I immediately ordered a copy for myself (so I could return the borrowed copy), as well as copies of Mr. Page's other books. If you write policies and procedures for a living, or are required to produce them for your department you should get this book ASAP. It will simplify the task and enable you to produce professional results regardless of your level of experience.

This book is just what is advertised, how to write better policies and procedures. It advocates the use of a writing format that makes for easy-to-read policies and procedures, a format that I know from conferences is used worldwide by many companies. This book is for procedure writers, not technical writers. And this book is not high-level, it is very detailed to the extent that my company has bought more than 25 of these books to hand out to each person who writes policies and procedures. While the book is very simple, it is still by far the best book I have read on the subject. I find the competition too convulted and they don't stay on the point. Not so with this author's books.

Jay

This book seems to be Chapter 4 of "Establishing a System of Policies and Procedures." This author has taken an entire chapter and turned it into a book. Thank you.

I love this book, I thought the author was detailed in his first book but this book is a real complement to the first book. These two books make for a good combination to buy. You can learn how to write a system of policies and procedures and then find incredible detail with this bok.

I just love this book. I loved the exercises and examples. It really did point out some mistakes I had been making in writing policies and procedures.

This book is better suited to experienced policies and procedures writers. If you are new to writing policies and procedures I highly recommend first reading the author's first book, "Establishing a System of Policies and Procedures" from which the key principles in this one are derived.

As someone who has extensive experience I found this book to be an invaluable aid. The structured format the author provides ensures that your policies and procedures are consistent.

The most valuable sections that even the most experienced writer will appreciate are (1)40-step action plan that sets forth roles and responsibilities, key tasks and quality assurance of your policies and procedures (this section is based on another of the author's books titled "Achieving 100% Compliance of Policies and Procedures"). (2) The 5-step writing process. This section is a model workflow that augments the action plan, as well as provide a good basis for estimating level of effort to produce policies and procedures. In fact, this 5-step process can be adapted to any type of writing from user manuals to proposals. I have completely incorporated this into my own "bag of tricks". (3)Templates and examples. The best way to learn is by example and the ones provided in this book add more value and show best practices.

Aside from providing an effective 7-step approach to developing policies and procedures (including the 40-step action plan and 5-step writing process), this book can easily serve as a style guide for corporate policy and procedure writers, as well as a training manual for members of business teams tasked with developing policies and procedures. I cannot emphasize strongly enough the fact that this book should be used in conjunction with "Achieving 100% Compliance of Policies and Procedures" if you are serious about quality policies that are enforceable. I also recommend that you consider "Establishing a System of Policies and Procedures" instead of this book if you are new to writing policies and procedures. After you've mastered the basics this book will serve as a ready reference.

THIS REVIEW IS FOR THE ELECTRONIC EDITIONS OF "ESTABLISHING A SYSTEM OF POLICIES AND PROCEDURES" ... AND ... "7 STEPS TO BETTER WRITTEN POLICIES AND PROCEDURES".

As a technical writer, I had mixed feelings about these books.

On the one hand, I thought they did an excellent job of presenting a simple, structured approach for developing and maintaining policies and their associated procedures in a systematic and consistent way. I think people who are new or relatively new to the work of developing such documentation should find these books to be valuable aids.

On the other hand, as someone who has been developing administrative and technical documentation for a number of years, I didn't find much here that was new to me. In many ways, I felt these books were an excellent presentation of "what I already know".

I felt the strongest points of the books were:

1) "The Writing Format" - The author makes it clear that the structure he uses for developing documents (which he calls "The Writing Format") is the core of his entire approach to developing policies and procedures. This simple, effective structure will be VERY helpful to those who've never had to develop standardized documentation before or for those who have yet to find a systematic approach for developing consistent documents.

2) Policies and Procedures in Support of Business Goals - All too often, policies and procedures are developed without the required connection to the ideas and realities that define the businesses for which they are being developed. Mr. Page does an excellent job of making it clear what a big mistake this is and suggests some ways to avoid this pit fall.

3) The Development Process - Many managers I've worked with over the years seem to think that good policies and procedures are something anyone can sit down and write in a few minutes. NOT true. Mr. Page does an excellent job of outlining the overall TEAM process by which good policies and procedures must be conceived, researched, drafted, reviewed, approved, published and continually revised and updated.

All in all, I think Mr. Page's books make excellent documentation development reference guides. But, as someone who has been developing administrative and technical documentation for several years, there were a few things I found disappointing:

1) Formatting - The visual formatting of Mr. Page's documents is VERY simple and, in my opinion, does not take very full advantage of the enhanced visual tools available in today's word processing programs. Designing documents that are visually simple to follow and help the user immediately recognize the logic of the document they are using is much easier with some of today's enhanced word processing capabilities. I would have enjoyed seeing examples of more sophisticated yet still straight foreward approaches to presenting information.

2) Editing - Especially in "Establishing A System of Policies and Procedures", I was surprised by the number of editing errors I found. They were not the sort of errors that make the book ineffective, but they detracted from the professionalism of the presentation.



I think for MOST people tasked with developing policies and procedures for a corporate or professional environment, these two books will be very good reference guides. But, if you've been developing successful documentation for a number of years and doing so with considerable skill and creativity, there may not be much new for you here.

Writing policies and procedures is challenging because if they are unclear they will not be followed. As someone who does this for clients I can attest that the writing format that the author Stephen Page suggests is the key to writing quality documents. The template for the 7 writing elements described in this book is an essential means of providing readers with a clear understanding of the policies and procedures.

The book is divided into 3 parts:
Part 1 discusses the writing format, the writing process, and "Editing Checklist" to improve your writing skills for policies and procedures.
Part 2 includes the case study that is the focus of the scenarios used for Chapters 4 to 10. Exercises, suggested answers, and explanations of these answers, are included for each of the seven sections of the Writing Format.
Part 3 contains three samples of policies and procedures for references and comparison purposes.

In chapters 4 through 10 exercises were given. I worked these examples through, and compared them with the samples of *good* and *not so good* answers that were in the book. I found that the book contained new ideas that I did not think of. Of course, there can be different answers, but these are great exercises to practice on to produce Policies and Procedures that will have a consistent and organized format.

The writing format is a great template and will provide structure to your documents. This book goes right next to my copy of Steve Page's Achieving 100% Compliance of Policies and Procedures as a valuable and frequently used tool.

The format that Stephen Page lays out is concise and allows for "precision writing" by giving the author of any policy and procedure the appropriate building blocks that such a document should have. Now in the Sarbanes Oxley era the need to document internal controls - and the policies and procedures that frame those - can be documented in an easy to use, standardized format that reduces wordiness and makes the writer, reader and user focus on what is really important - the content.
Great job Stephen!

This is a very useful book. It is also badly written, immensely repetitive, in need of a good editor, and filled with pages with very little on them. The basic idea is solid; I have used this format and like it. But for this much money for such a slim volume, get they typos fixed.

Let's take page 29, one of my favorites. As he numbs you with tiresome near-wordplay, he offers this advice for your Editing Checklist:

5) Check for clarity: Are your words or sentences ambiguous? Will readers always understand your use of vague pronoun references like it and they and this refer to? Will readers be able to follow your train of thought? Have you used specific rather than vague words? Have you left a reader in doubt as to the meaning of critical words? Have you sued the appropriate vocabulary for the audience?

6) Check for brevity or conciseness: Have you used too many words? Are their (sic) redundancies? etc. etc.

This is pitiful.

Savor that beauty "Will readers always understand your use of vague pronoun references like it and they and this refer to?" Know what he refers to? How about adding a "whom" to that sentence, Steve? You get bogged down in that muddy prose so badly even you don't realize you are missing an object. Should have taken your own advice. Read Strunk and White to see how these ideas should be presented.

You don't make things clearer by saying them over and over.

The sloth of saying "brevity or conciseness" is amazing. That is neither brief nor concise (hmmm, what's the difference there?)

It goes on and on. I was exasperated and annoyed. What a shame; there's a really good magazine article in there.