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Documentation Improvement Methods: The New Accounting Manual, Second Edition, seeks to change the popular perception of the documentation process as well as to the end product, the procedures manual. Within the documentation process is the potential for illuminating the functions, processes, and procedures of the organization. This potential turns the documentation process into an opportunity for organizational learning, since it is well recognized that questioning the status quo facilitates innovation.

In the past, those assigned the chore of documenting procedures have merely recorded the status quo without asking any questions about it. This led to the process being accorded scant respect. One could ignore the state of affairs in the area of procedure documentation were it not for the outpouring of reports describing organizations busily redesigning their work. Given such changes in the way various processes are being performed throughout organizations, why not improve the process used for procedure documentation as well? It seems well suited to spark questions concerning the status quo within the accounting departments. Through such questions, one could turn the documentation process into an occasion for learning.

The basic idea expressed here was put forth in my paper "Procedures Documentation Ought to be Illuminative Not Just Archival" published in a Sage Publications, Inc. journal Management Communication Quarterly.Vol. 8, Issue 2, November 1994, pp. 225-243.

Organizational change is becoming globally endemic. Corporations are busily reshaping the processes and procedures they rely on to get things done. Even though organizations have begun to reinvent what they do and how they do it, these emerging management concepts and organizational practices have yet to reach procedures documentation, an organizational communication genre. The winds of change have yet to reach the procedures documentation process.

Academics do not even teach procedures documentation, let alone teach it as an activity whose uses and value reside in the entire process and transcend the end product, the documentation itself. Like academics, managers continue to see documentation as an afterthought rather than the learning organization paradigm and extension of process redesign that it is. Professors and practitioners both mistakenly see procedures documentation as merely archival.

Seeing procedures documentation as merely archival has isolated this organizational communication genre from the developments taking place within contemporary organizations. Such isolation has prevented procedures documentation from becoming a useful tool, an occasion to review and prune outdated, inefficient, or redundant procedures, and to think of newer ways to do things in view of changing environments and technologies.

By not limiting procedures documentation to merely the final act of writing the procedures manual, but seeing it broadly as an illuminative tool, an organization can learn how to streamline its own processes. The value of procedures documentation resides in the process of creation as well as in the document created.

Current practice only mirrors the existing process, thereby perpetuating the status quo with all its flaws. Rather than simply reflecting the status quo like a mirror, procedures documentation should also illuminate like a lamp the adequacy of current practices and processes.

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