Q1 Communications Limited

Business process documentation

Although most companies know what business they are in, and can provide a mass of information about their products, surprisingly few can tell you exactly how they carry out their day-to-day activities.

Is this important?

Well, if you don't know how you do what you do how do you know if you are doing it right?

Do you have set ways of carrying out actions that are different from the norm? Are your processes efficient and cost-effective? Do you measure the efficiency of your departments and, if you do, to what do you compare them?

Business Process Re-engineering, BPR, has been a major feature in the business landscape over the last few years and we have been heavily involved in its associated documentation with a number of world-leading organisations including Exxon, Philips and Citi.

Of course, you don't have to be a large organisation in order to document your processes and procedures, and the financial gains can be significant even for smaller businesses. Talk to us about the benefits of a fully-documented organisation.

Test scripts

We have many years' experience writing test scenarios and scripts that accurately test new systems and measure them against user expectations.

With a wide experience in a variety of business sectors we are adept at providing scenarios that get to the heart of a business. We ensure that the tests properly examine an organisation's day-to-day functions and take in to account extraordinary occurences and those once-a-quarter events.

User, quick reference and 'How to…' guides

These sort of documents have traditionally been the bread and butter of the technical author and, despite the increase in online help and computer-based training programs, they remain an important part of the document set.

You may have noticed that people still like to take a print of screen-based help pages. Moreover, a great many business tasks don't require a computer so information that is only available on-screen is not much use.

For day-to-day purposes, a five point bulleted list stuck to a desk, and describing how to process an invoice, is likely to be more useful than five pages of online process flows.

A paper document is portable, browsable and can be annotated. Most importantly, some workers just prefer it.

Reports

Above all else, Q1 is concerned with communication.

For most companies, the report is the usual vehicle for disseminating information internally and to other organisations.

We can help you write a report from scratch or polish, reformat and edit something that you have written yourselves.