Write down a procedure step by step

A procedure is the way your company does one piece of work, written as steps in order. An article explains something. A procedure says who does what, where, how long it takes, and what happens when there is a choice to make. Because of that structure, DealJourney can draw it as a flowchart and add up the hours.

The quickest way: let Dealy interview you. Open the section the procedure belongs in, choose New procedure, then Interview with Dealy. Dealy asks one question at a time: what starts the work, what happens next, who does it, in which system, how long it takes, and what happens if the answer is no. It saves a draft as you go and reads it back before you publish. Talking through the work is usually much faster than typing it out, and most people have never written their procedures down anyway. The same button on an existing procedure has Dealy fill in what is missing.

Writing it yourself:

1. 1Choose New procedure in a section.
2. 2Fill in Starts when, Done when, Owner and Runs per month.
3. 3Add a step for each thing that is done. Give it a short name under What happens, and fill in Who does it (a role, not a person), Where and Minutes.
4. 4Where the path splits, make the step a Decision and add one choice per answer, each pointing to the step it leads to.
5. 5Mark each step's Automation: done by hand, could be automated, a strong candidate, or already automated.
6. 6Save. Set it to published when it matches how the work is really done.

Reading a procedure. The Checklist tab is for the person doing the work, such as a new hire. The Flowchart tab is for understanding it: one row per role, so you can see where work passes from one person to another. Handovers are where things usually get delayed or dropped.

Where the hours go. Procedures at the top of the knowledge base adds up every procedure. It shows the hours a month by role and by system, and lists the steps most worth automating, largest first. The totals only count procedures with times and a monthly count filled in, so a procedure missing those is flagged instead of quietly counted as zero. You can ask Dealy the same thing ("where does our time go?", "what should we automate first?").

Dealy reads published procedures like any other article. Once a procedure is written down, it can answer "how do we do X here" from it.