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July 28, 2025
If I tell you:
Chapter 1, purpose of the document.
Chapter 2, perimeter.
Chapter 3 glossary.
Chapter 4, roles and responsibilities.
Chapter 5 steps of the procedure.
Etc.
Maybe it reminds you of something?
Who said that a proceeding was supposed to be 30 pages?
Do we really have to respect this archaic structure?
Procedures as we know them were born in 1987 with the advent of the ISO 9000 standard.
It's the famous one:”I describe what I do, I do what is described“.
That's when businesses started to write procedures to get certified against this quality standard.
But the problem is that we have seen more and more procedures with more and more content appear.
Following this, electronic document management software or EDM was created, to manage all these documents.
Then the ISO 9000:2000 standard arrived, starting to talk about processes, to try to put all this content in an order that made sense.
With the advent of process management, tools for Business Process Management have emerged, supported by the BPMN standard.
The problem with all of this is that you're just piling up documents over and over again.
Imagine Michel, an average person who takes his job and finds himself today with 150 procedures to read at his workstation, in the pharmaceutical industry.
If each procedure is between 15 and 50 pages long, Michel therefore has about 4000 pages to read to learn how to do his job.
At Sinfony, we think it is high time to change all that.
You can do procedures if you still need them.
So here are 3 tips for making effective 5-page procedures.
You can also find the content of this article on our YouTube channel, and subscribe 👍
After analyzing tons of documents, we diagnosed that the information in the documents can be sorted according to The QQOQCCP method (who, what, where, when, when, how, how much, why).
We noticed a clear majority of”wherefore“and of”whats“in the documents.
The reason is simple.
Over time, procedures have become spillways viz.
A kind of Wikipedia for experts who used procedures to store their knowledge in writing in the absence of other means.
So, in the procedures, you have a lot of content that is nothing but knowledge, knowledge.
In the procedures, you also have a lot of”how“.
At the time of the Marmiton or YouTube tutorial, the”how“written in proceedings, is really dated and ineffective.
In your proceedings, you also have references to lower or upper limits for parameters, or target values for these same parameters.
It's totally useless!
Instead, put these limits in traceability records such as batch records in pharmaceuticals, and that's OK.
This is all the better since our employee Michel will know what the expected target value is when he starts.
So... fire him.”How many“!
I can go into detail and you also talk about the”where“and of the”when“, but the article would become unnecessarily long.
I think you got the idea.
Keep only the “who does what” in your procedures.
I have often seen proceedings on micro perimeters.
This practice leads to multiplying the number of proceedings unnecessarily.
On the other hand, do a proceeding through process sharply reduced the number.
As you focus the proceeding On”Who does what“, a few pages are enough to describe a process whole.
If a proceeding Explain”Who does what“throughout a process So, do a proceeding Which contains The process flowchart and a responsibility table in the form of RACI chart.
In this regard, you can find the series on RACI best practices on our YouTube channel in clicking here and on the blog Over here.
With these 3 tips, your proceeding will only be a few pages long, replacing numerous procedures of several dozen pages each.
If you are interested in the subject, you can also take a look at our article on the SOP-Less quality system which completely abandoned the concept of procedure.
Finally, I give you the link to our free training in documentary simplification.
See you soon