How to document and embed best practices that stick with Harv Nagra

Are you battling with inconsistent processes, bad practice and poor staff training? 

In this episode, Harv Nagra explains the benefits of documenting and embedding best practices – to take your agency one big leap forward in operational maturity.

Harv shares his best tips on:

• Creating an agency handbook – to create a single source of truth for your business, and help your team work consistently
• Choosing the right documentation tools – specific tools that are helpful in documenting and communicating workflows
• Creating a team of best practice champions – by providing learning resources that let them build confidence from day one

Ready to future-proof your agency? Join Harv in this episode as he explains how to take your agency to the next level.

Harv's preferred tools mentioned in the episode:

• coda.io
• scribehow.com
• loom.com

Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/

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This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system.

Transcript

Harv Nagra: 0:00

Thanks for listening to The Handbook: The Agency Operations podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Scoro. So how's a platform like Scoro different from project management tools like Asana, click up and monday.com? Those platforms can be useful project management tools, but what they don't do is cover the end to end agency workflow. What I mean is that they're not designed to create your quotes, resource your projects, monitor your budget and financial performance, invoice what you've done and report on your business. That's the difference between a PM tool and a PSA, Professional Services Automation tool. I think of it like an operating system for your agency that brings together all these functions and interlinks everything so you're not left with data in silos and having to copy information from one place to another. Scoro stood out amongst the competition when I was looking for a new platform at my agency. That's why I brought it in. Sign up for a free trial at Scoro.com or if you arrange a demo call, tell them Harv sent you. Now back to the episode. Hey all, welcome back to the handbook. Previously, we had an episode under The Big Agency Club theme with Sarah Brougham. She had some fantastic examples of how she learned to hire the right people, how to onboard them efficiently and effectively to give them the best opportunity to flourish in the role, and how to look at offboarding beyond just contracts and systems, but add steps that consider whether or not you want to retain the individual so you're prepared to have those conversations rather than handling it on the fly. All really good advice. Today we're gonna be building on that mature agency theme by talking about centralizing and codifying your agency's knowledge, which tools you can use for this, as well as embedding best practice in your agency in terms of your systems and workflows. Who are we talking to? Well, today, you're stuck with me. There are occasions when there's a topic that I'd love to share my thoughts with yourselves. So that's what we're going to do this week. In the coming weeks on the podcast, we are working on episodes around business maturity, as well as speaking to an agency that is at that higher level of maturity, which will hopefully serve as inspiration for us. So that's something to look forward to coming up. Now, let's get started with this episode. Alright, with regards to business maturity, we can look at this as a scale. On one end, we've got chaos and making things up as we go. On the other end, you're data driven, innovating and miles ahead of the competition. The biggest initial milestone, in my view, is right in the middle. Level 3 of 5. Why? This is where your agency finally has documented best practice, and linked to that great training practices. You're no longer making things up on the fly, but have a carefully considered way of doing things consistently. This stage is also a milestone because this is when you start generating good data. This might have come through lessons learned. In the earlier stages of maturity, it's quite likely that finances and metrics were super high level, hoping that the revenue you have coming in is greater than your expenses. That might be okay when you're just getting started or you have just a handful of people in the business. But there will come a point when you're just too large to operate that way. When the cash situation is making you uncomfortable, or maybe the volume and complexity of projects is now at a point where you need to carefully start planning who's going to be working on what. No matter the reason though, there's typically been a pain that's been experienced that leads to recognition that more mature tools are required. This tends to be where agencies start bringing in a PSA or professional services automation platform that joins up large parts of this workflow so that you have greater visibility in what you're doing and how you're doing it. I've gone on a bit of a tangent here talking about Level 3, this milestone in maturity, but a quick recap. We've got documented best practice, better tools in play, which enable us to generate good data. Okay? So let's get back to documentation. A handbook. The handbook. Your agency operations handbook. At one point when I was new in the ops role and the business I was working for wasn't operating at a particularly mature level, we brought in a new COO, who I was reporting to, who asked me to start creating an agency handbook. Years before that I'd created and launched our agency Intranet. The reason I did that was that we had multiple entities, offices in different countries, and I felt that we weren't communicating enough and sharing our work. So it was a way to start creating that sense of community and connection beyond the annual Christmas party or whatever. So I have to admit, at the stage of maturity where we were, when my boss asked me to create this handbook, I, I despaired. Looking around and looking at the way we operated, I think it was probably that level two. We had pockets of best practice, but It was very reactive, we were very inconsistent. I didn't have a lot of hope. I remember starting to create this resource, this handbook, and feeling super dejected, Thinking that I was wasting my time and i'd be creating this document for myself and nobody else was going to be looking at it. The good news? I was proven way wrong. So, why is codifying your ways of work important? You know, part of maturity, part of that maturity model is operating consistently, having best practice. Having that single source of truth, not just rumors and interpretations of how things are done. A single place where everyone in your agency can reference to find the right answer is so important. Before we had this documented resource, New Starter onboarding was completely organic. You'd come in on your first day and hope there was a plan for being onboarded. The truth is, it was mostly made up on the fly. Somebody might have thought about it the day before, but the point is, it wasn't repeatable because it wasn't documented. It had to be reinvented every time, and in all honesty, it probably wasn't very thorough. From the perspective of the new starter, they'd likely be left hoping that their new colleagues would have time And show them what they needed to know. I don't know about you, but I am very stressed on my first day, first week, first month, maybe even the entire probation period of a new job. So put yourself in the shoes of someone that's just come in and is having to absorb information in drips and who's quite likely learning the new ways of doing things from the person sitting next to them, picking up all their bad habits rather than learning the best way to get that thing done. I mean, it's probably not that hard to imagine because I'm fairly confident that each of us listening to this has probably gone through that in their careers multiple times. So hopefully you have recognized how important this is to set up and get right. So with this agency handbook, what you're creating is the official way to do things and the official place to go and look. You're letting everyone know there's a single place to reference before they come asking for questions on their particular nuance. In a nutshell, you're moving away from being reactive to being proactive. You've learned what works well and you've put it down. All right, so let's talk about tools. With regards to the tools that you can use to create your handbook, there's loads out there. There's general document collaboration tools like Google Docs, Notion, Confluence. There's specialty knowledge base or handbook tools like Blissbook, Guru, Trainual, Slight, Slab. I'm sure there's loads more that I've missed. I'm not going to go into the pros and cons of each of them, but a few personal opinions. Google Docs, in my view, it's an easy place to start. But it can get messy and difficult to keep organized. So I'd personally steer clear of that one. I kind of like having a handbook that's its distinct place. So, rather than referring to Google Docs, which is just jumbled in with everything else you have, I would prefer a separate resource with its own URL. That kind of thing. Alright? That brings us to Confluence, a documentation platform. And now this is my personal biased speaking, okay? I like a good interface, and I find Confluence bit ugly. The parent company, Atlassian, they've got multiple products, and I find the backend permissions a bit of a jumble, and I've never enjoyed using it, so I just find it unnecessarily complex in the backend, and I find the frontend interface a bit uninspiring, and not somewhere I want to spend most of my day. It's possible the interface has moved on, on the backend permissions and all that, but I am not a fan, so I would skip that one. The specialty knowledge based tools, they're great. Some of those, like I've mentioned above Trainual, Slight, Blissbook and the like, some of them even have AI functionality built in to help you find the answers so that people don't have to go and search for that particular article, but they just type in their query and it answers it. That's pretty cool. But it's up to you to look those up and see if they're what you actually need. And also decide if you do need a specialty tool, or if you're just looking to get started in something simpler, and document management, is fine. That's what I've done in the past, just stuck to the documentation tool. If somebody asked me to create a new handbook from scratch, I might have a look at the pricing and functionality of the specialty tools and see what's evolved. But if you're just looking to get started or reboot what you have, I don't think it's essential. It's a nice to have. So in the list above that I shared, that leaves Notion. I mean, Notion is a great tool, and it's very flexible. We've probably seen their cute ads on public transport. You might even have an account for your personal life. If you're already using it in your agency and have all the accounts already, it's a no brainer. You know, use Notion. But my agency was not using Notion, so I'll tell you why I didn't end up selecting When I was creating my agency handbook, I was trying to do it efficiently and not add a huge new subscription cost into the mix. So, what did I use? I used a platform called Coda. And, why? As a platform, it's very similar to Notion. It looks and feels like Notion. In terms of functionality, it's as capable. In fact, I have read articles that it's considered actually more capable of more advanced functionality, like managing databases and running formulas. But, you know, we don't really need that at this point. We're creating documentation for our handbook, right? So it allows you to create nested articles. You can format them how you like. You can add nice header images, branded header images if you want. And you can use anchor links in your articles so it's easy for people to use an index and scroll down. You can embed videos. You can create tables and do loads more. As a bonus, it also works with Google or Microsoft SSO by default, so your team can use those to log in so they don't have to remember or create a new login for that platform as well. But what I really loved about Coda was the price. You only have to pay for document creators. So if you're starting out your new handbook, then at first, you might be the only one that's creating new documents or new pages. All the editors are free, all the viewers are free. And eventually, if you delegate ownership of sections to department heads and want them to be able to create new pages in their own sections, then you'll only need to pay for them. So if you're looking to control costs, it's probably the single most cost effective platform in the list. You only need to pay for document creators, if that's just one person, that's all you'll have to pay. It's only$10 per DocMaker per month on the annual plan, so that's super cheap. All right, so we've selected a platform, but what do you actually start to document? I'd start by creating a table of contents of what you think should be included. As an example, my handbook had three main subsections: the employee handbook, The software and tech handbook, and the delivery handbook. I'll tell you more about each of those. In the employee handbook, I included things like mission, vision, and values. I included a section on people and teams there. I had policies there. Then in the software and tech handbook, I included a page here for all the tools the team would be using, including a short summary of what it was for, which teams it was relevant to, and how they could request a login if it was required. You might think this is overkill, but I even included a one hour Mac induction in this section to get people orientated to shortcuts on their Mac. I was finding that too many people didn't know a lot of shortcuts. So they'd spend a lot of time on doing way too many clicks or mouse pointing at things when they could do things really easily with a few swipes of their trackpad or shortcuts with their keyboard. So the whole point of that was to say, Hey, these are some of the things that you can do on your Mac to speed up your workflow. Also in this software and tech handbook were the two most important sections in my view. The induction to Dropbox for Business and our professional service automation platform or PSA, which was Scoro. I'll come back to this later. Finally, let's move on to the delivery handbook. In this section, I included all the delivery related items from the overall project methodology to the pitch qualification process, to how to find stock content, how to license fonts, the AI guidelines, how to write handovers, how we handle the resourcing, how NDAs were created, et cetera, et cetera. Another section that could have been quite useful is to consider having a sales and marketing handbook where you outline all your processes around marketing, social media, and sales. So what you include in your handbook is completely up to you and what's relevant to your business. Again, I'd start with just that table of contents. You'll likely already have a lot of this content floating around in different places in your agency. So the point is to start centralizing it so that people don't have to hunt for it and there's no excuse to say that they didn't know where to find it. Alright guys, let's talk about best practice. When I think about best practice in an agency, a couple of things come to mind. Things like how we handle clients and client comms, how we handle pitching and sales, how we deliver work efficiently, and how we run our projects. I personally tend to use the word process interchangeably with best practice. But I know some people have a strong reaction to the P word because they take it as some kind of inflexible set of steps. That's not what I'm talking about. I am talking about best practice, which is a framework of the best way to do things. The point of best practice is to communicate to everyone the standard way things are done based on prior experience and learnings. That doesn't mean it's set in stone. Things change, clients change, tools change, and you might discover more efficient ways to do things. So your best practice needs to change as well. Now when it comes to embedding best practice as an ops director, something that was important to me and the head of finance was to ensure that we were delivering work profitably. We had a PSA platform, and so it was very important to us that we were using it to control projects, but also to see how our business was performing. That required people to use the tool in the right way. It wasn't about rigidity. It was about knowing how things are done and ensuring that their projects and information are up to date and that the data being produced is accurate. I sometimes hear people wondering or worrying about training around platforms like this. Whether they're using a PSA platform or not. Wondering how they can get everyone up to speed and working in the same way. Using the systems consistently and how to handle new starters that come into the business as well. I'll tell you what I did. When we first rolled out our new PSA at the agency, we had a company wide training session. There was one one hour training session for the individual contributors, the designers, the developers, the strategists, to understand how they could see their schedules and how they would confirm the time for what they were booked on and how they could manually look up a project and add time to things that they had to work on which were unplanned. That recording session was recorded. Then, we had two two-hour training sessions for the account managers, project managers, finance, operations, and upper management. We told everyone that they absolutely did not need to take notes. That all these sessions were for was to show them how the system worked and how work flowed through it from the incoming lead through to a quote, project delivery, invoicing, payment, and close. So those two training sessions were recorded as well. Now with those recordings, I used them for new starter onboardings for the platform, and the same rules applied. No notes, just watch and understand how it works. Alright, so people have sat through the exposure to the system. How are they expected to remember any of this when it comes to their actual projects? Well, in the handbook, in the software and tech section, under the Scoro page, I created an index of short videos that were just a couple of minutes in length each. I think I started with something like 15 items when we launched the platform, And at some point it was up to 40 with the various FAQs and edge cases that had come up and we documented. But this index and these videos covered everything an account manager or project manager might be expected to do in the system. You know, creating that new quote, creating a new client or supplier, turning it into a project, raising the invoice, creating a PO, tracking their project budget, etc, etc. The point was, when it came to getting used to the platform and understanding best practice, whether this was an existing employee that was transitioning to the new system, or a new employee doing their onboarding, they had an index of how to videos they could reference that explained what to do and how to do it by following along. This meant that I didn't expect people to watch that four hours of training videos and try to find the right point where their question would be answered. They didn't need to ask their colleague and get questionable advice on how to do that thing. And they didn't need to ask me or the head of finance on how to do it the right way. If they came to me with a question, the first thing I'd say is, Did you watch that video number 12 in that index. It shows you how to do that. Watch that first, and if you still have questions, or if your situation is different, come speak to me after you've had a look. That worked really, really well. I also made a point of saying to people that in their first several weeks of getting used to the new system, I didn't want them to go based on memory. That I preferred that they watch that mini video before they took the next big step in their project, so that they'd get the definitive advice again and again, until it became second nature. Now, of course, every project is unique, so they were able to tailor what they did to suit their requirements. But what this meant is that finance and ops didn't need to spend a huge amount of time each month retroactively fixing invoices and POs and having to fix data and troubleshoot and so on. It meant that people got it. And as a result of that, we got accurate data coming in and out of the system. And for new starters, depending on the role, I also created practice cases for them to walk through creating that quote, looking up a client, raising that PO and invoice, closing the project and so on. This meant that before they started running their own projects, the week after they started onboarding, they'd gone through it once before and therefore they had a good idea how things work. This made them feel so much more confident. By the way, another reason creating this kind of resource is so important is that when you go live with a new system, of course People are going to be anxious and stressed. So by being able to say, Hey, we've thought about all your use cases. We've created this really easy to use index for you to reference that you can follow along and it's going to answer all of your questions is so reassuring. It really, really helps ease that kind of stress and that transition. Okay, so we've embedded that best practice. I just wanted to talk about a few other of my favorite tools for documentation. So I already spoke about using Coda for the handbook in general. That's what I preferred. But for those how to videos, I absolutely loved using Loom. It's so easy to use. It sits in your menu bar as an icon on your Mac. And when you're ready, you just hit record and it just records what you're doing on screen with a voiceover and a little video thumbnail if you want. And as soon as you stop recording, it uploads it to the cloud immediately. And then you can edit out anything you don't want right on their website. And then it's ready to go. Whether you're linking people to that resource on loom or you're embedding a link to that video in your handbook. Another great tool that you can use is called scribe. So what you do with this tool is that once you hit record, you just go through the steps to complete the operation, whatever it is. And once you're done, it creates a step by step guide, which you can embed in your handbook. So another really great one. Now I have to be honest, for really short, simple things, I think a few written instructions are fine. Step one, step two, step three. For something that requires a few more clicks, Scribe can work really well. It just adds that screenshot element and makes it really easy for people to follow along. But my favourite really is using Loom for video. I just love that you can give the person listening a lot of context really quickly, as well as show them how to do the thing they need to do. So I'm a big fan of video for the more complex stuff that requires the most context so that people aren't left having to read a huge paragraph and loads of steps or scrolling down through endless screenshots. So I really love video for that reason. Alright guys, so that brings us to the end of our episode today. We've covered a lot. We've talked about why creating a single source of truth via your agency handbook is so important in your journey to maturity. Tools you can use to create the handbook. What you should document. How to embed best practice in your agency. The tools you can use in your handbook to create how to guides. Creating this resource is a major milestone that takes your agency from level one chaos or level two reactivity towards level three in maturity. Even if you already had that in place, hopefully there were some ideas here that I've shared that you can use to augment your own handbook. And if I've missed anything that you do that works really well, I'd love for you to share that with me on LinkedIn when you see me post about this episode. I know there was a lot of information here. So if you want a cheat sheet with the summary of this episode, sign up for the handbook newsletter at scoro.com/podcast. You can scroll down on that page and there's a place where you can enter your email. And lastly, have you told your friends and colleagues about this podcast? Please share this episode with someone you think that would benefit and tell them that they should subscribe. Thank you so much for listening and we'll be back with the next episode soon.