Documenting Process

What is a process and how to document the process. Many people are asked to write process documentation. In life, people rarely agree on the definition of words. Everything is semantics. What does the word mean to me and what does it mean to you and can we agree and can we agree to disagree.

Here are my definitions.

Process -  First, you need to know at what level of the organization the process applies to. This determines the level of the roles. For example an organization has the following organizational levels: executive, departments, and teams. Perferablty all roles are at the same organizational level. If The roles are The who (Roles) and in what order (Steps) needs to interact to achieve the stated objective (Verb Noun). Each person or group is a Step in the process. From the process perspective, each Step is a "black box", what they do and how they do it is not important. What is important is to document who and their outcome/output of the Step. What is being captured is the flow.. Process title should be written. Process for Organization Level to Verb Noun, for example Process for Marketing to Create User Account

Step - Each step is a single role is needed to achieve the stated objective. The step is defined in the format of Noun Verb Objective, for example Team Lead approves user account or Network Engineer creates user account. A new step is added only when another person or group does something. What get done in the step is describe in the procedure for the step.

Task- A procedure is one outcome or task of the Step. How the procedure is completed is docmented with work instruction, which is sometime refered as Standard Operation Procedure (SOP). The Step Network Engineer creates user account, then has Procedures might be  Network Engineer creates in AD a user account and then Network Engineer assigns secutiry groups to user account.