Roofing Back Office

Administrative Support

Process Write Ups for roofing contractors

The whole value of writing this down goes to somebody who is not in the room. The person writing it is the last one who can tell whether it worked.

Nate Jones · Founder, Roofing Back Office

Nate Jones is the founder of Roofing Back Office. On this desk he writes down what companies do, mostly by asking questions whose answers everybody assumed were obvious.

Last updated · Reviewed by Nate Jones

What you end up holding

A written account of how your company actually does a thing — not how it was designed to, and not how it would describe itself. Produced from watching the work and asking about it while it happens, because a process recalled in an office is a summary and a process observed is the thing itself.

With it, the part most documents leave out: the decisions. Every real process has moments where somebody chooses, and those are precisely the moments the person who knows it will not mention, because to them it is not a choice, it is just what you do. Naming them converts the document from a description of the easy path into something usable when the situation is not the easy one.

The writer already knows the answer

This is the difficulty, and it is not a matter of effort or writing ability. Somebody who understands a process cannot read a description of it as a stranger would. They read a gap and fill it silently from what they know, and every reading confirms the document is clear. It is clear — to them, and only to them.

The result is a very particular kind of failure. The document is accurate. Nothing in it is wrong. It simply omits the four or five things that would stop a new person dead, and it omits them because those things were never visible to the person writing. Which supplier account to use when the usual one is on hold. What counts as close enough on a measurement. Who to ring when the answer is not in the document, which is the single most useful line in any procedure and is almost never present.

So the only real test is external. Give it to somebody who was not there and watch where they stop. Every stop is a defect, and defects found that way are cheap. The same defects found later are found by a new hire on their second week, at the cost of an interruption to the busiest person in the company, which is the outcome the writing was meant to prevent.

None of this is discoverable by rereading. That is why the work has an outside party in it at all: not because writing is hard, but because the one perspective the document has to survive is the one nobody inside the company still has.

What process write-ups produces, and what holds each piece up A horizontal spine carries three labelled artifacts produced by process write-ups: a written description of how it is done, the judgements it had to make, and a trial by somebody who was not there. Beneath each artifact a vertical line drops to a second tier naming what holds it up — respectively written from watching it happen, not from recalling it, the decision points named instead of quietly assumed, and read by a stranger before anybody called it finished. Across the foot of the diagram a separate band states the judgement this function does not make, which is whether the process described is the right process. The diagram shows structure only and contains no figures. What this desk produces A written descriptionof how it is done The judgements it hadto make A trial by somebodywho was not there written from watching ithappen, not from recallingit the decision points namedinstead of quietly assumed read by a stranger beforeanybody called it finished Every item above sits on the one below it. Outside this desk Whether the process described is the right process
Each artifact on the spine has something underneath holding it up. That is the whole design: process write-ups is not an argument, it is a set of items that can each be traced to how they were arrived at, so that the writing is tested by a reader rather than by its author. The band across the bottom is the part that stays outside the work.

What makes one worth keeping

It says what happens, not what should happen. A document describing an aspiration is worse than nothing, because the reader follows it, gets a result nobody expected, and concludes the documentation is unreliable — which they then generalise to all of it. If the current process is untidy, the honest description of the untidy process is the useful artifact, and improving it is a separate decision made afterwards with better information.

It names an owner for the parts that need one. Most processes contain a point where somebody has to approve, choose or accept, and a description that says "it gets approved" has documented the existence of a gap rather than closed it. Naming the role turns a reader’s dead end into a phone call.

It separates what is stable from what is volatile. Prices, supplier contacts and system names change on a different clock from the shape of the work, and weaving them through the prose guarantees the whole document rots at the speed of its fastest-changing detail.

And it has been read by somebody who did not already know. That is the only property on this list that cannot be assessed from the inside, and it is the one that decides whether the document is finished. Everything else can be checked by looking at the page.

One step short of a procedure

Documentation is one desk inside Administrative Support, and the limits that govern the whole department are set out there rather than repeated here. What this desk writes is internal process description. The written programmes a contractor is genuinely required to hold are part of the safety programme, which this brand does not own or author.

What owners ask before writing anything down

What kinds of things get written down?

Whatever currently only works because a particular person is available. How a job goes from signed to scheduled. What the office does when a homeowner rings about a leak on a completed roof. Which supplier gets called for what, and what the account arrangements are. How a change order gets priced and who approves it. None of these are complicated; all of them are held in somebody’s head, and the test of whether that matters is what happens during the week that person is away.

Who does the writing?

We do, from watching and asking, which is the part owners find surprising. The instinct is to have the person who knows the process write it, and that reliably produces a document that is correct and unusable — they skip what is obvious to them, and what is obvious to them is exactly what a newcomer needs. Somebody who does not already know the answer asks better questions, because they are genuinely asking.

How long does this take away from the person who knows the job?

Much less than writing it themselves would, and that is the main reason it gets done at all. Being interviewed while doing the work is a fundamentally different demand from being asked to sit down and produce a document, and it happens in the ordinary run of the day rather than in an evening that never arrives.

Our processes change. Does this go stale immediately?

Parts of it will, and a document that admits which parts is far more useful than one that pretends to be permanent. The stable material — who owns a decision, what has to happen before what, where a thing gets recorded — changes slowly. The volatile material is usually specific names, prices and supplier arrangements, and if that is separated out rather than woven through the text it can be revised without rewriting anything else.

Is this the same as writing our procedures?

It is the step before, and the distinction is not academic. Describing what happens is one job; turning a description into something that produces the same outcome no matter who follows it is another, and it involves resolving all the places where the current answer is really just judgement. A description is finished when a stranger can follow it. That is a lower bar than the one a procedure has to clear, and the sibling page below is where the harder half lives.

What do we get if we never use it?

Honestly, less than the effort is worth — which is why the work is scoped to processes with a real reader in prospect rather than to everything. The usual triggers are somebody joining, somebody leaving, an owner wanting a week off, or a function moving to a desk outside the company. If none of those is anywhere in view, the return is genuinely thin and worth saying so.

The writing this desk does is nobody’s requirement

A page of this kind would normally close by linking the rules it argues from. This one has none to link, and the reason is worth stating rather than leaving as a blank space. The written programmes a contractor is genuinely required to hold are part of the safety programme, and this brand explicitly does not own or author that — the boundary is set on the dispatching-operations department page. What this desk writes down is internal process, which no regulator prescribes for a roofing company.

What it is held to instead: A document is finished when somebody who was not present can follow it and get the same result.

Where the regulated part of this subject lives: the safety programme, which the brand does not own — see /services/dispatching-operations/.

Hand your best document to somebody new

Say nothing, and watch where they stop. Every stop is a defect, and you will find more of them in ten minutes than in a year of rereading.

Get in Touch Call 615-873-2843