Policy & Procedure Development

Sometimes we overlook critical processes that require documentation, or worse, create unnecessary Policies & Procedures. These  are often added  to fix controls without considering the negative impact on the existing processes. Over time these Band-Aids create an inefficient,  spaghetti-like mess that makes day-to-day activities laborious. 

Let Proteus Project Associates help your company to strengthen you current Policies & Procedures.

Process decomposition's can be used to  identify and map out individual steps. The steps should highlight  important day-to-day activities so companies can correctly align  P&Ps with processes, not vice versa. 

Create a process improvement vision to  help determine the desired future state process environment. Create a  team of cross-functional process owners and subject matter experts to  develop the vision while considering the impact on organizational  structures and systems configurations. Get signoff on the improvement  vision by senior management. 

In Project Management it is important to assign ownership to  processes to avoid duplicate efforts, unnecessary steps and control  issues. Recommending changes that reduce an employee’s level of  responsibility often elicits strong emotional resistance. Reassigning a  function, task or employee can be equally challenging. However, a RACI  (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) matrix is a helpful  tool to define roles and responsibilities for each process. 

A combination of process flows and RACI diagrams can be used to  determine the best way to configure systems to support the new  day-to-day activities while providing the right level of controls. The  configuration changes to support the new processes and organizational  structure should be prioritized based on implementation complexity and  P&P rollout schedule. 

Policies and Procedures are the glue connecting the Project Management processes, and roles and  responsibilities. This step is easy when done correctly and all previous  steps are followed. Procedures should reflect policies and policies  should be tied to controls. Old policies should be modified to reflect  the new processes. If gaps are identified, new policies should be  developed.