Dedicado aos que pensam que estas coisas só acontecem em Portugal

Estados Unidos, Outubro de 2002, unidade de fabrico da LEGO.

"You've never been trained in it? I asked the operator on the production line at LEGO. I was holding the operating manual open at the page showing the process that I had been referring to. The machinery was whirring in the background, we had to raise our voices slightly to be heard. There was a row of 12-14 vibratory bowls, each about 1m wide, in which LEGO bricks were automatically sorted and counted, then dropped into bags.

'No,' came the reply.

I took the manual to the supervisor, who told me: I've never even seen it before.'

The official LEGO quality operating processes looked impressive on paper; the problem was that operators did not follow them - or were not even aware of them, in some cases."

Dedicado aos que pensam que estas coisas só acontecem em empresas de vão de escada e em Portugal. 

Trecho retirado de "Deliver What You Promise" de Bali Padda.  

Processo versus procedimento

Isto é tão, mas tão verdade:

"If you belong to an organisation that still considers existing documented procedures as quality management processes not only have you not captured the spirit of the new approach but you should be picked up by your customers and other assessment organisations as not meeting the requirements of clause 4.4.1. The fact that more nonconformities haven’t been raised against organisations says a lot about the state of third-party certification and its economic need to survive. Perhaps conformity assessment bodies (CAB) are retaining paying customers who don’t actually deserve to hold the certification."

Recordo:

• de 2010 - O mundo das auditorias da qualidade está louco (parte III)
• de 2011 - Lindos exemplos do país das certificações da qualidade
• de 2015 - Só cometo uma batota 

Trecho inicial retirado de "ISO 9001 Process approach"

ISO 9001: Processos, procedimentos e modelos

Disclaimer: Não conheço nem a empresa nem os consultores. Por isso, estou à vontade para deixar fluir o meu lado cínico.

Na internet encontrei o artigo "Transição do SGQ da Valinox - Indústrias Metalomecânicas S.A. da ISO 9001:2008 para a ISO 9001:2015".

Ao ver a figura que se segue:

Torci o nariz com aquele "Manual de Processos e Procedimentos".

Uma coisa são processos e outra coisa são procedimentos. Alguns consultores parece que não conhecem a diferença e, por isso, misturam tudo, para não serem obrigados a explicitar a diferença.

Depois, vem o "mapeamento dos procedimentos".

Bingo!
Confirma-se a suspeita da confusão entre procedimentos e processos. A norma fala em "mapear" processos, a figura diz que é sobre o "mapeamento dos procedimentos". Depois, o conteúdo da figura fala em processos:

Mapear os processos de uma empresa significa desenhar um modelo do funcionamento da empresa.
E recordo e uso muitas vezes a frase: Todos os modelos estão errados, alguns são úteis!

Como separo procedimentos de processos, os meus modelos são muito menos povoados:

Em vez de 19 processos/procedimentos só 9 processos.

Qual o critério que uso? Simples, já o uso há anos. Nas minhas formações sobre indicadores uso este slide:

A minha maldade final.

A ilusão das regras (parte II)

Parte I.

"This is a growing concern as organizations — like society in general — tend to become more risk averse. Introducing ever more rules looks like a simple and effective way to lower risk.
...
Limiting people’s freedom does indeed mean they have less opportunity to do the wrong things or to do them in the wrong way (at least, that is what you hope!) But it also restricts their ability to do things that are worthwhile: experimenting, using their judgement, being creative. How can people learn from experience if their options are curtailed by a forest of rules?
...
Many rules were originally intended to be guidelines to help shape behaviour, but instead over time get codified into rigid laws. Often most people in the organization no longer know why the rules were even implemented. And yet depressingly, “Rule Nazis …. They cling to the rules like Leonardo DiCaprio clung to that door in Titanic — as if their lives depend on it. And they make sure everyone else does too, even when the rule doesn’t make sense or stands in the way of productivity,”
...
Rules mostly creep in one by one. As their number grows, they contribute to a culture of conformity, rather than one of intelligent judgment and empowered employees who do what is right.
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Maybe such hard compliance is exactly what you want. But it’s worth making really sure, because the control it gives you can be illusory. If your organization relies on bright people responding intelligently to the complex interactions with your customers or service users, or with their colleagues, then you had better think twice before you implement yet another rule. Otherwise you might find yourself having to appoint someone to change dumb company rules.
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Don’t let rules rule your organization."

Como não recordar as greves de zelo.

Trechos retirados de "The Rule Illusion"

Acerca dos processos

A grande vantagem da ISO 9001 para muitas PME reside em resolver o tema que se segue:

"what are her first impressions of the fitness sector in this respect? "It's a very inspiring industry, but when you pull back the blankets there aren't really any standards or processes. And that's not just in our company: we had none when I arrived, but I can't find them anywhere. No best practice, no standards, no systems. "When I joined Jatomi Fitness we had 18 different logos, but that was just a symptom of the root cause: a lack of standards. So we've gone back to the foundations, effectively building these under the existing company — putting standards and processes in place to create what I call our gym blueprint, which covers everything from the hiring process to building a new club. If you want to grow as a brand, you have to have these systems and processes — it's just not possible to do it without them."

Cada vez menos PME sem processos definidos... bem, ás vezes aquilo que as empresas de processos não são processos a sério mas essa é outra história.

Trecho retirado da revista HCM de Janeiro de 2016, no âmbito de uma entrevista com Tracy Gehlan CEO da cadeia de clubes Jatomi Fitness:

Cahord

Esta imagem fez-me logo recordar:

• a anedota por detrás das greves de zelo; e
• o exagero da procedimentação;

Este é um ponto forte que os humanos terão de explorar cada vez melhor na sua competição com as máquinas, a capacidade para lidar com dois conceitos antagónicos em simultâneo. Perceber que têm de existir regras mas que elas são sempre instrumentais e, por isso, por vezes, um pouco de caos permite descobrir uma nova abordagem mais adequada perante um novo contexto.

Imagem retirada de "The Expression of Phenomenology in Business"

Acerca dos procedimentos escritos

No mês passado escrevi sobre a greve de zelo.
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Nas últimas semanas tenho estado a animar uma acção de formação sobre "Gestão de Processos" com gente interessada e que coloca muitas questões. Como todos têm sistemas da qualidade ISO 9001 implementados nas suas organizações acabamos por discutir muitas vezes o papel dos procedimentos e do grau de pormenor mais adequado.
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Pois bem, quando ontem citei Gary Klein, acabei por ir reler um pouco o que sublinhei das minhas leituras do livro "Streetlights and Shadows - Searching for the keys to Adaptive Decision Making" e recordei estes trechos sobre o papel pernicioso dos procedimentos escritos:

• "A paixão por procedimentos (parte I)"
• "A paixão por procedimentos (parte II)"

Volto também a Stacey com "Quanto menos, melhor"

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BTW, ao reler a parte inicial da parte I, sorrir e relacionar com o texto de Seth Godin acerca do nível 5.Expert... 

Commander's Intent versus Conformidade com os procedimentos

Continua a minha reflexão sobre a função dos procedimentos documentados e sobre o grau de pormenor a neles incluir, através da discussão mental desencadeada pela leitura do livro "Complexity and Management - Fad or radical challenge to systems thinking?" de Ralph D. Stacey, Douglas Griffin e Patricia Shaw.

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Esta leitura em curso, encaixa-se perfeitamente com o sentido deste texto retirado do livro "Made to Stick" de Chip Heath & Dan Heath:

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""The trite expression we always use is No plan survives contact with the enemy," says Colonel Tom Kolditz, the head of the behavioral sciences division at West Point.
…
Many armies fail because they put all their emphasis into creating a plan that becomes useless ten minutes into the battle."
…
Colonel Kolditz says, "Over time we've come to understand more and more about what makes people successful in complex operations." He believes that plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. But as for the plans themselves, Kolditz says, "They just don't work on the battlefield." So, in the 1980s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander's Intent (CI).
CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan's goal, the desired end-state of an operation.
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The CI never specifies so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events. 'You can lose the ability to execute the original plan, but you never lose the responsibility of executing the intent," says Kolditz.
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Commander's Intent manages to align the behavior of soldiers at all levels without requiring play-by-play instructions from their leaders. When people know the desired destination, they're free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there.
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I could spend a lot of time enumerating every specific task, but as soon as people know what the intent is they begin generating their own solutions."
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Estamos a falar da actuação de um exército, paradigma do respeito pela hierarquia, em que falhar é, muitas vezes, morrer.

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A mim, pessoalmente, isto deixa-me a pensar...

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BTW, este conceito de "Commander's Intent" fez-me recordar Boyd e o que aprendi sobre o blitzkrieg.

• "Schwerpunkt"
• "Schwerpunkt (II)"
• "Auftragstaktik" ("Auftragstaktik encourages commanders to exhibit initiative, flexibility and improvisation while in command. In what may be seen as surprising Auftragstaktik empowers commanders to disobey orders and revise their effect as long as the intent of the commander is maintained.")
• "Parte I - os alicerces da guerra relâmpago (Blitzkrieg)"

Julgo que Seth Godin escreveu qualquer coisa como "Os líderes têm seguidores, os gestores têm empregados". Tom Peters volta e meia escreve no twitter "Os líderes não criam seguidores, geram novos líderes"

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(1)"The German army leaders “consciously traded assurance of control for assurance of self-induced action.”
These leaders developed a military cultural norm that supported and expected decisive action by subordinates in the face of uncertainty or ambiguity.

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Fundamental to the success of Aftragstaktik in the German doctrine was trust. Silva writes: “Trust between superior and subordinate is the cornerstone of mission-oriented command. The superior trusts his subordinate to exercise his judgment and creativity, to act as the situation dictates to reach the maximum goal articulated in his mission; the subordinate trusts that whatever action he takes in good faith to contribute to the good of the whole will be supported by his superior.”"

...

Os líderes geram seguidores, partilham a intenção, comungam do propósito e, geram novos líderes, pois sabem que é impossível ao Grande Planeador tudo prever.

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Isto exige confiança, exige conhecimento, exige competência, exige motivação, exige responsabilidade.

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Quando facilito a descrição e documentação de um processo gosto de reflectir sobre a finalidade: Qual a finalidade do processo?

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A finalidade é o mais importante, é a razão de ser do processo. Costumo dizer que de nada serve sermos honestos e cumprirmos o procedimento se a finalidade não puder ser cumprida, seremos como os músicos do Titanic.

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(2)"“The commander’s intent describes the desired endstate. It is a concise statement of the purpose
of the operation and must be understood two levels below the level of the issuing commander. It must clearly state the purpose of the mission. It is the single unifying focus for all subordinate elements. It is not a summary of the concept of the operation.
Its purpose is to focus subordinates on what has to be accomplished in order to achieve success, even when the plan and concept no longer apply, and to discipline their efforts toward that end."

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Trechos (1) e (2) retirados de "Communicating Intent and Imparting Presence".

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Do texto "Evolution of Commander’s Intent in the US Military" retiro ainda "The decision-making process requires making assumptions, establishing estimates, developing possible solutions, analyzing and comparing possible solutions, and selecting the best situational solution." e agora imaginar uma realidade em constante mutação plena de incerteza, ambiguidade e de assimetria na informação recolhida e processada.

Greve de zelo - uma anedota

Ainda me lembro do sorriso interno que fiz quando, ainda miúdo, ouvi na rádio o anúncio de uma greve de zelo, salvo-erro dos estivadores de Leixões, e percebi o seu sentido.

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Segundo a wikipedia temos: "Operação-padrão (ou greve de zelo em Portugal): Consiste em seguir rigorosamente todas as normas da atividade, o que acaba por retardar, diminuir ou restringir o seu andamento. É uma forma de protesto que não pode ser contestada judicialmente, sendo muito utilizada por categorias sujeitas a leis que restringem o direito de greve, como as prestadoras de serviços considerados essenciais à sociedade, por exemplo. É muito utilizada por ferroviários, metroviários, controladores de vôo e policiais de alfândega, entre outros."

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É espectacular este conceito!!!

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Não é de esperar que se sigam normalmente no dia-a-dia as normas previstas?

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Então, existem normas previstas, mas não se espera que as pessoas as sigam na realidade. Aliás, segui-las na realidade até prejudica o desempenho da organização...

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Isto quer dizer que as normas previstas existem mas não são para ser utilizadas?

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Estão a perceber porque sorri com a insanidade da situação?

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Então, para que é que existem essas normas? Por que é que não são postas em causa? Por que é que as organizações não têm normas previstas que as ajudem a realizar a sua missão no dia-a-dia?

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"We all know, however, that rules, procedures and systems on their own are not what make an organization function. One of the most reliable ways of bringing an organization to its knees is for its members to do precisely what the rules and systems stipulate and nothing more. In other words, systems in organizations can only function if the members of the organization weave their day-to-day interactions with each other through and around the rules of the systems they have designed. Systems work, to the extent that they do, because of the informal, freely chosen, ordinary, day-to-day cooperative interactions of an organization’s members, and this cannot be controlled. It seems that this is how they “get things done anyway.” If this is so, then such activity cannot be understood from either mechanistic or systemic perspectives because the underlying theories of causality upon which those perspective are built exclude the very human freedom upon which the kind of day-to-day cooperative interaction we are referring to depends. That ordinary, everyday freedom is not necessarily democracy or empowerment, but the ordinary choices people make as they weave their daily activities through and around systems guiding and constraining their work."

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Continuo, interessado e curioso, com a leitura de "Complexity and Management - Fad or radical challenge to systems thinking?" de Ralph D. Stacey, Douglas Griffin e Patricia Shaw. Curioso em saber onde nos leva o pensamento dos autores.

A paixão por procedimentos (parte II)

Continuado.

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"Procedures can erode expertise.

When we get comfortable with procedures, we may stop trying to develop more skills. Why bother, if the procedures usually get the job done?

...

A number of studies have shown that procedures help people handle typical tasks, but people do best in novel situations when they understand the system they need to control. People taught to understand the system develop richer mental models than people taught to follow procedures."

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"Procedures can mislead us.

The biggest worry is that following procedures can lead us in the wrong direction and that we won’t notice because the reliance on procedures has made us so complacent."

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Á atenção dos auditores "Skilled performers need latitude to depart from procedures."

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Recordo um velho episódio de um dos meus heróis dos anos 80 "Macgyver". Um episódio em que MacGyver tem de vencer Sandy, um computador:

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"MacGyver: Well, old Sandy sure has a mind of her own, doesn't she?
Jill: Yes, but she thinks like me. So I should be able to think it through and find her pattern, logically and rationally.
MacGyver: Without the emotion, right?
Jill: That's what gives her the edge. People and emotion can't get in her way.
MacGyver: Well, I say we trust our instincts—go with our gut. You can't program that. That's our edge."

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"In summary, we can see that procedures are insufficient, can get in the way, can interfere with developing and applying expertise, and can erode over time. Procedures work best in well-ordered situations in which we don’t have to worry about changing conditions and we don’t have to take context into account to figure out how to apply the procedures, or when to jettison them"

...

"Procedures are most useful in well-ordered situations when they can substitute for skill, not augment it. In complex situations—in the shadows—procedures are less likely to substitute for expertise and may even stifle its development.

Here is a different statement that I think works better: In complex situations, people will need judgment skills to follow procedures effectively and to go beyond them when necessary."

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Portanto, quando um consultor que nunca teve outra ocupação para além de consultor, postula, decreta, ordena a criação de procedimentos por tudo e por nada... beware!!!

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"Like all tools, procedures have strengths and weaknesses. Although I have been describing their limitations, we certainly shouldn’t discard them. Here is what they buy us:

• They are training tools. They help novices get started in learning a task.
• They are memory aids. In many jobs they help workers overcome memory slips.
• They can safeguard against interruptions.
• They reduce workload and make it easier to attend to critical aspects of the task.
• They are a way to compile experience and historical information. Procedures are useful when there is a lot of turnover and few workers ever develop much skill.
• They can help teams coordinate by imposing consistency. If the people on the team know the same procedures, they can predict one another’s next moves."

...

"The downside of procedures is that they usually aren’t sensitive to context. In complex situations we may not know when to start and end each step. The people making up procedures usually try to substitute precision and detail for tacit knowledge."

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Para terminar, uma sugestão que descobri na prática, não há muito tempo:

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"When we do want to teach some procedures, the typical way is to present the standard procedures and make everyone memorize them.

Here is another way to teach procedures: Set up scenarios for various kinds of challenges and let the new workers go through the scenarios. If the procedures make sense, then workers should get to see what happens when they depart from the optimal procedures. When procedures are taught in a scenario format, people can appreciate why the procedures were put into place and can also gain a sense of the limitations of the procedures. This scenario format seems to work better than having people memorize the details of each step."

A paixão por procedimentos (parte I)

De 1 a 7, em que 1 é "discordo totalmente" e 7 é "concordo totalmente" como classificaria a frase:

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"Teaching people procedures helps them perform tasks more skillfully"

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BTW, tenho previsto na minha agenda para hoje, criar uma instrução escrita sobre como elaborar uma lista de verificação no âmbito da preparação de uma auditoria, para distribuir numa acção de formação em curso...

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"The process of transforming skills into procedures is irresistible. All we have to do is break a complex task down into steps and provide some tips about when to start and finish each step. Then we hand the procedures out so that workers can perform this task even without years of practice."

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E quero que as pessoas sigam religiosamente a instrução?

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Se vou criar a instrução é porque julgo que terá algum valor, porque julgo que pode ser útil para quem nunca teve de traduzir um critério de auditoria num conjunto de questões a colocar, ou de observações a realizar durante uma auditoria. E eu, sigo a instrução? ... às vezes. Já realizei tantas auditorias, já preparei tantas listas de verificação que às vezes, perante um caso concreto resolvo fazer uma experiência e seguir outra abordagem.

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"By the time people become proficient, they are seeing situations instead of calculating procedures. Experts rely on their immediate intuitive responses.

...

Procedures, including checklists, are tools. Every tool has limitations, and I am not arguing that we should do away with procedures."

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E agora algo que perturbará a mente cartesiana de alguns que tudo querem legislar:

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"In complex settings in which we have to take the context into account, we can’t codify all the work in a set of procedures. No matter how comprehensive the procedures, people probably will run into something unexpected and will have to use their judgment. It often takes government regulation to force organizations to compile reasonably comprehensive sets of procedures, and those procedures usually have some gaps.

Even the routine task of flying an airplane can move beyond procedures. And in emergencies, procedures may be cast aside."

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Quantas vezes já vimos isto:

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"... a common problem and a consequence of trying to make procedures sufficiently comprehensive. The more comprehensive the procedures, the more voluminous they become. And the more voluminous, the more forbidding they appear, the more work to find what is needed, and the lower the chances that anyone will try."

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"Procedures are often out of date because work practices keep evolving.

...

Because procedures keep evolving, procedural guides are rarely complete"

...

"Over time, some procedures became obsolete or even counterproductive. The people doing the job learned workarounds. They used their experience to adapt, just as we would expect in a complex domain. But how often could the managers revise the procedural manuals?"

...

"Inevitably, the procedures lagged behind the actual way people did their work. Up-to-date procedures had to be interpreted and carried out by workers using their judgment and experience, and obsolete procedures created even more headaches.

But there is a bigger problem than the fact that procedures are rarely sufficient and often out of date. In many cases, procedures can make performance worse, not better. They can lull us into mindlessness and complacency, and an erosion of expertise. In some cases, procedures can mislead us.

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Procedures can lead to mindlessness and complacency.

Procedures can lull people into a passive mindset of just following the steps and not really thinking about what they are doing. When we become passive, we don’t try to improve our skills. Why bother, if all we are doing is following the procedures? So the checklists and procedural

guides can reduce our motivation to become highly skilled at a job."

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Mas então vale a pena seguir, manter procedimentos?

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Continua

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Trechos destacados do livro "Streetlights and Shadows - Searching for the keys to Adaptive Decision Making" de Gary Klein.

Intuição vs Procedimentação

Assisti em primeira mão, sobretudo durante a década de 1985 a 1995, ao despedimento, com indemnizações e pré-reformas, de muitas pessoas com dezenas de anos de experiência.
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Em muitos casos tal foi acompanhado por processos de re-engenharia e/ou automação ou procedimentação das práticas.
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Em muitos casos tal foi acompanhado com a admissão de caloiro(a)s muito mais barato(a)s.
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Volto a Gary Klein e a "The Power of Intuition" com um trecho que chama a atenção para o papel da intuição e o perigo da procedimentação pura e simples:
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"The pace of change continues to accelerate. Historical ways of doing business are pronounced obsolete, and the experience of seasoned employees is discounted. Tried and true approaches are treated as legacy problems that have to be replaced. The specialists who have mastered these approaches are then part of the legacy problem.
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Many organizations attempt to take refuge in procedures. This happens when supervisors play it safe and reduce the task to procedures even if those procedures don’t really capture all of the nuances and tricks of the trade. Turning a job into a set of procedures makes it easier for new workers to carry out their responsibilities, and it also supports accountability by letting managers more easily verify if the procedures were followed. Unfortunately, this practice can make it even harder to build up intuitions if the procedures eliminate the need for judgment calls. Clearly, we need procedures to help us react quickly to emergencies, or to orient new workers. Once a set of procedures is in place, however, supervisors may not bother teaching the skills workers need to understand or modify the procedures. This is how the expertise that makes a company great gets lost. There is a strong tendency in our culture to proceduralize almost everything, to reduce all types of work to a series of steps. But you cannot reduce intuition to a procedure.
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Organizations may try to reduce decisions and judgments to procedures by defining metrics (i.e., measurable objectives). Metrics are often seen as a way to replace intuitions. They can be useful as a corrective to relying too heavily on impressions, but if managers try to make decisions based on numbers alone they run the risk of eroding their intuitions.
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Finally, information technologies are taking their toll. Too often decision aids and smart systems are reducing their operators to clerks responsible for feeding data into the systems. In the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, nurses are given much more training to operate the monitoring equipment than in how to detect the subtle signs of illness in the infants. Operators come to passively follow what the information technology recommends rather than relying on their intuition.
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We have less time and fewer chances to achieve expertise in our current jobs compared to previous generations. And we are faced with the obstacles listed above that further degrade our intuitions. Diminished experience, rapid turnover, little coaching, increased pace of change, reliance on procedures and metrics, widespread use of information technologies to make decisions—all of these create an unprecedented assault on our intuitions.
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Why do we tolerate all of these barriers? Because people don’t fully understand what intuition is and how it develops. So they’re unaware of these barriers and their cumulative effects. The erosion of intuition will continue until we take active steps to defend ourselves.
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Business leaders rarely have sufficient data for conducting analysis. As time and budgetary pressures increase, we have fewer chances to try options out to test their feasibility, forcing us to make snap judgments. At times like these, intuition must replace guesswork. This is why the loss of intuitive decision-making skills is so detrimental. (Por isso falo e escrevo na importância da experiência de vida)
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The longer we wait to defend our intuitions, the less we will have to defend. We are more than the sum of our software programs and analytical methods, more than the databases we can access, more than the procedures we have been asked to memorize. The choice is whether we are going to shrink into these artifacts or expand beyond them."

Procedimentos vs fichas de processo

Ontem perguntaram-me "Qual a diferença entre ficha de processo e procedimento?"

Começamos a montante, ao nível mais elevado: a organização.

As organizações, se cumprirem a sua missão podem aspirar a produzir resultados.

Os resultados futuros desejados são diferentes dos resultados de hoje. Para transformar a empresa actual na empresa do futuro há que fazer alguma coisa, há que agir!

Agir onde?

Como passar das ideias, dos desejos, para o concreto?

Precisamos de um modelo do funcionamento da organização, uma simplificação da organização real, para percebermos como é que ela funciona, para estudarmos diferentes alternativas de a influenciar, para descobrirmos onde alavancar as mudanças que criarão o futuro desejado.

Recorrendo à abordagem por processos, podemos modelar o funcionamento de uma organização vendo-a como um sistema, um conjunto de entidades interrelacionadas e interactuantes. A essas entidades damos o nome de processo.

Um processo é um conjunto de actividades que de forma sintonizada, transforma entradas em saídas.

Um processo existe para cumprir uma finalidade: um processo é transformação, é acção, é fluxo, é aquilo que fazemos para contribuir para o negócio.

Qual a finalidade do processo "Produzir"? Para que é que o processo "Produzir" existe?

Por exemplo: cumprir o plano de produção, sem atrasos, sem defeitos e ao menor custo!

No processo "Produzir" não decidimos o quie vamos produzir, recebemos um plano de produção e temos como objectivo cumprir esse plano sem problemas!

Se o plano está errado... não é no processo "Produzir" que isso se resolve mas no processo "Planear produção".

O nosso modelo de funcionamento de uma organização é uma simplificação da realidade, não tem um número elevado de processos. Só "isolamos" aqueles que achamos relevantes para o desenho do modelo.

Usamos o documento "Ficha de Processo" para descrever como é que cada um deve actuar no âmbito de um processo, e assim, assegurar uma menor variabilidade, uma menor dispersão das práticas e dos resultados.

Daí que uma "Ficha de Processo" responda a questões como: O que se faz? Quem faz? Onde faz? Quando faz?

O objectivo do documento é dar essas respostas.

Por outro lado, se o processo foi considerado relevante, tem de, deve ser medido. A ficha de processo além das respostas inclui a lista de indicadores que são usados para avaliar o cumprimento da finalidade do processo.

Se é preciso descer a um nível muito detalhado, se é preciso responder à questão "Como se faz?" então remetemos esse pormenor para um outro tipo de documento, a "Instrução de trabalho"

Quando temos um conjunto de actividades que não fazem parte da lista de processos seleccionados como relevantes, por exemplo: "Realizar auditorias internas" (composto pelas actividades: Programar auditorias; Preparar auditoria; Realizar auditoria; Relatar auditoria; Seguir auditoria; Reflectir sobre as auditorias) podemos precisar de responder às mesmas questões O que se faz? Quem faz? Onde faz? Quando faz? Como não estamos perante um processo seleccionado, chamamos ao documento procedimento e não ficha de processo.

Também se usam os procedimentos para listar conjuntos de regras, por exemplo, podemos ter um procedimento que tem por objectivo descrever as regras de atribuição de um código de lote, ou as regras de segurança a seguir num armazém.