Editorial Review:
Establishing a System of Policies and Procedures is a basic guideline for writing policy and procedure documents for any company, any size, and in any industry. This book is a primer and sets the stage for Stephen's three other books: Achieving 100% Compliance of Policies and Procedures; 7 Steps to Better Written Policies and Procedures, and Best Practices in Policies and Procedures
This book introduces the reader to the basic phases required for writing any policy or procedure. These phases are: Research, Writing the first draft, Reviewing the draft, Approving the draft, Publishing, Communicating, and Training the final, approved policy or procedure document. Additionally, the reader will learn how to maintain the policies and procedures and keep the content up to date. And lastly, the reader will learn how to convert manual, hard copy policy and procedure documents into online, virtual documents.
Examples of policies and procedures and tables of contents are shown at the back of this back.
Buy this book now and you'll be on your way to writing accurate, consistent, and reliable policy and procedures documents.
Cached date: AWS Called=true
You may also be interested in these products:
These categories may also be of interest to you:
Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
Excellent Book on Creating Standard Operating Procedures and Policy Manual 2008-08-19
This books provides concrete guidance for creating a policies and procedures manual. After reading the EMyth Revisited (also an excellent book) I wanted a book that would provide such guidance and this book delivers. A couple of points. First, this book is an overview of the entire process. Some of author's other books in this series take chapters of this book and expand them to book length. I was particularly interested in guidance for writing a standard operating procedures manual, and the book "7 Steps to Better Written Policies and Procedures" focuses solely on that topic. Second, despite my focus on the actual written policy/procedures manual, the entire book is excellent, raises points that may be easily overlooked, and I would highly recommend it.
Great resource for starting from scratch 2008-07-23
I just took a job as an operations analyst at a small startup company. Rather than handing me a policy and procedures manual, my boss asked me to write one instead! With only vague notions of what a policy and procedures manual looked like, I tried to get started but quickly realized that I was in over my head.
So I bought Stephen Page's books on policies and procedures and found the help I needed. The most difficult part for me has not been writing down the procedures themselves (though that can be challenging). Instead, I realized that without a good format for writing a policy or procedure, the whole manual would be a jumbled mess of incoherent instructions. But after reading Stephen Page's books, I was able to use his format very effectively. The greatest strength of his format is that it is easy to use, and also easy to update as things change.
So whether you are starting from scratch on a new manual or editing your compnay's existing manual, check out these books first. You will not regret it!
A must have for any procedure analyst 2007-04-27
This book is clear, concise and easy to follow, whether you are starting from nothing or you are bringing your current policies and procedures up to standard. This is a must read for the procedures analyst and for the CEO who believe in continual improvement.
For optimal result buy the set of 4 books:
1. Establishing a System of Policies and Procedures
2. Achieving 100$ Compliance of Policies and Procedures
3. 7 Steps to better Written Policies and Procedures
4. Best Practices in Policies and Procedures
You will not be disappointed. This set is well worth your time and money.
Good for Beginning and Intermediate Users (3.5)  2005-12-29
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.
Nasty Reviews 2005-10-24
I love these procedure books and they are the most comprehensive on the web. To see nasty reviews from a reviewer that is ranked 1,065,501 on Amazon's reviewers list is atrocious. Take it from me, a seasoned policy and procedure writer, this book is truly a landmark for both beginners and seasoned writers like me. Think about it. The book is short and takes about 2 hours to read. Believe you me, you'll be glad you gleaned so much information in such a short time. You'll soon be on your way to writing clear and consise policies and procedures. I did.
Ron Fisher
|
|
|
|
