Operations manual template

This sizes an operations manual before it is written. Enter the departments or functions it covers, the procedures per department, the company policies, the forms and appendices, the words a procedure and a policy typically run to and your review cycle, and the page returns the total procedures, the chapters, the numbered entries, the length in words and pages and the reviews per year. A manual is a set of entries with owners, not a document; the page counts it that way so it can be written, approved and reviewed one entry at a time.

Entries, not pages, are the unit of a manual

Five departments with six procedures each, eight policies and ten forms is forty-eight entries, and each entry has an owner, a version and a review date. The page counts entries first because that is what gets approved and reviewed. A manual thought of as a document gets approved once and reviewed never; one thought of as forty-eight entries gets reviewed four times a month.

Chapters follow the departments, plus three

A working manual opens with how to use it, the company and its policies, and closes with the forms and appendices, which is three chapters around one per department. The page prints that count so the structure exists before the first procedure is written and the writers know where each entry goes.

Length is a decision, and the page makes it visible

Forty-eight entries at your word counts is a length in words and, at four hundred words a page, in pages. The page prints both so a manual that would run to three hundred pages is caught at the sizing stage rather than at the printing stage. Shorter entries and more of them is nearly always the better manual.