When I was brainstorming about Clarify tips, Trevor, the developer of ScreenSteps and Clarify, told me that his friend asked him for his pizza dough recipe - perfect! Why not use Clarify to document the process for making the dough, rolling it out, and topping it off?

In this Clarify tip, Trevor is going to show you how he makes a very tasty pizza dough:

• First, make the dough
• Second, roll it out, top it off, and bake it
• Third, eat it (no article was written for this step)

A few months ago I wrote a blog article comparing great documentation to great food recipes. I find the documentation in most recipe books amazing - it enables folks who have never set foot in a culinary school, or had the luxury of having Ms. Patmore as a mentor to them, recreate masterpieces right in their very own kitchen.

If the recipe is written well, then it's like having restaurant style food right in your home.

If the recipe is missing something, however, then the results are less than optimal.

And the same thing applies to processes in your organization - If your documentation is written well, then you can enable others to be able to do what you do. This allows you the ability to move up the ladder,  take a vacation, or actually take a sick day. You can also delegate tasks out to virtual assistants and either work fewer hours or get more things accomplished in the same amount of time.

If your process "recipe" is written well, you can get the same quality results from somebody else's efforts - it's sort of like cloning yourself.

So next time you write process documentation, think of it like a food recipe - if the results don't turn out right, your recipe might be missing information.