Being a project manager isn’t easy.  How do you keep our OPAs up-to-date and easily accessible?  What steps can we take to ensure everyone uses these resources consistently?

You have a list of daily challenges to tackle to ensure your projects are delivered before the scheduled deadline.

In an attempt to resolve these challenges quickly, you sometimes drown yourself in piles of data, often gaining no insights from them.

But you still do to ensure your team stays on top of all the deliverables. This scenario can be resolved if you have organizational process assets in hand.

What Are Organizational Process Assets?

Organizational process assets (OPAs) can be treated as accumulated knowledge your team and you have gained while working on multiple projects. These resources allow you to identify possible solutions that can be implemented if and when your team comes across challenges during the ideation, execution, and testing phases of a project.

With OPAs, you can:

• Prevent your team from repeating the same mistakes in future projects.
• Speed up the project initiation and execution process.
• Ensure that a certain level of consistency is maintained across all project stages.
• Reduce operational risks like losing resources and having no backup of such resources later on.
• Facilitate knowledge sharing and transfer within the team and ensure avoiding organizational silos.

Types of Organizational Process Assets

Given how OPAs work and benefit an organization, you can get a fair idea that they aren’t restricted to just one or two types of documentation. Some of the common OPAs you can see throughout an organization include the following:

a. Organizational Knowledge Base Assets

A knowledge base would represent multiple people populating information in the documentation. They might have upgraded it whenever the team members recognized new updates or changes. This asset will mainly include:

• Wikis and documentation
• Project post-mortems and lessons learned
• Expert insights from senior team members
• Success/failure case studies
• Performance metrics from past projects
• Risk response outcomes and effectiveness
• Historical project timelines and costs

b. Standard Operating Procedure

A standard operating procedure document or SOP will likely include a step-by-step procedure that allows readers to complete a task consistently without errors. This documentation benefits businesses, especially when new employees are onboard and want to train them for various processes related to their job role. This asset will mainly include:

• Project initiation protocols
• Quality assurance workflows
• Change request handling steps
• Stakeholder communication protocols
• Resource allocation guidelines
• Risk assessment methodologies
• Issue escalation procedures

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c. Processes

Processes are integral for boosting team productivity and even simplifying team onboarding. They are interrelated steps that help everyone in the team complete a task. For example, setting task dependencies in a project management system is a great way to understand them. Until and unless someone completes certain activities, the task completion process remains stagnant, and other team members cannot offer their input.

This asset will include:

• Project lifecycle phases and gates
• Work breakdown structure creation
• Document control procedures
• Performance review cycles
• Progress monitoring systems
• Requirements gathering methods

d. Policies

These are rules, regulations, or guidelines that govern the decision-making process in a team. Policies are a great way to set boundaries and expectations for managing and executing a project. This asset will include the following:

• Project governance frameworks
• Remote work protocols
• Data privacy requirements
• Code of Conduct guidelines
• Security and compliance guidelines
• Resource utilization rules
• Authorization levels

e. Templates

Templates are your pre-formatted documents and tools that offer a standardized starting point for common project deliverables. You can treat them as ready-made frameworks that save time and ensure consistency. In the case of project management, you will mainly see template assets for:

• Project charter formats
• Risk register spreadsheets
• Budget tracking sheets
• Stakeholder analysis tools
• Status report layouts
• Communication plan matrices
• Meeting agenda formats

f. Contract Agreements

This is where legal agreements are made and maintained. Contract agreements are legal and bind the entities to formalize the relationship during the entire project lifecycle. They are mostly signed by stakeholders like clients, vendors, partners, and the company managing the project.

Contract agreements allow a business to safeguard the rights of its employees and other stakeholders regarding their expectations, obligations, and terms of engagement. This asset typically includes:

• Vendor management frameworks
• Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)
• Licensing agreements
• Procurement guidelines
• Service level agreements (SLAs)
• Partnership contracts
• Statement of work templates

Best Practices for Managing Organizational Process Assets

Now that we know what organizational process assets are, the benefits one can gain from their use, and their types, let’s look at some of the best practices that will enable you to manage these from the ground up. Some of our tried and tested best practices include the following:

1. Make Use of a Knowledge Management Software (KMS)

One of our tried-and-tested best practices is to create process documentation using our knowledge management software, Document360.

Creating this documentation has allowed us to:

• Share product documentation, such as sales, success, support, and marketing, with our internal team members and with our customers.
• Improve support process and resolution time for each query.
• Create a knowledge repository that can be updated whenever a new feature or upgrade is added to our product.

This has helped our development team track all the changes to the product so far and devise new upgrade plans that further improve user experience.

But other reasons why using a tool like Document360 would be beneficial for those who plan to create OPAs for their organization is because:

• It allows you to search for any documentation in seconds. Its AI search assistant, Eddy, enables users to find relevant information and even offers article summaries that help them understand the context faster.
• Its AI capabilities aren’t restricted to search. You can also use its generative AI capabilities to write content and its titles to help you get started on the content part.
• It allows you to add graphics like videos, images, and even GIFs to help users add more visual information that can be consumed faster and enable people to act on the information faster.

Therefore, having a KMS system will enable your project team to write and store all processes, SOPs, policies, and contract documentation in one place.

2. Prioritize Compliance and Security

Set access rules and regulations when creating OPAs. That’s because such documentation will include sensitive data for the readers. Set condition on:

• Who can edit the content in these documents?
• Who can only view these documents?
• How many people will be granted administrative access to the documents?

If you do this, fewer people get to make changes to these assets. What’s more, it will be essential for you to conduct security audits for all the assets you generate. If you are using a KMS system, it will help you track who changed what and when in the assets.

Doing so will enhance the security of these assets and protect them from external threats.

3. Promote a Culture of Knowledge Sharing

Build an environment where sharing insights becomes second nature.

Host casual knowledge-sharing sessions and document all the experiences, whether good or bad, for others to reflect on. In a collective session such as this, you can celebrate your team members’ wins and offer better solutions to improve them in the future.

This activity encourages everyone in the team to share the knowledge they’ve gained and you get to avoid creating organizational silos.

4. Standardize the Documentation Practices

Set clear, simple rules for building documentation from scratch or create templates that team members can follow to align with the existing documentation format.

This standardization of documentation practice will allow you to avoid messy documentation and irregular formats throughout all your OPAs. You can also set formats for consistent file names and document categories. This way, everyone will know which articles should be added under which category and how they must be stored in the system.

5. Align OPAs with Organizational Goals

Regularly step back and ask: “Are these assets still serving our purpose?”

This is one question you must ask yourself regularly to ensure your OPAs align with your organizational goals.

If the current process documents don’t align with your current goals, it’s better to update them and inform others to review them once they’re added to other OPAs.

Measure how well your OPAs support your goals through practical metrics like:

• Which process documents are most frequently referenced
• Number of team members actively using the OPA system
• Decrease in revision cycles for deliverables
• Fewer compliance issues due to standardized procedures
• Time saved in onboarding new team members
• Faster problem resolution using documented solutions

Managing OPAs isn’t just about maintaining a library of documents and processes—it’s about creating a dynamic system that grows and adapts with your organization. You can identify what drives value by tracking concrete metrics, from usage patterns to efficiency gains.

Start Creating Organizational Process Assets for Your Business Right Away!

Start small by documenting your most successful processes and crucial lessons learned. Also, focus on creating assets that solve real problems your teams face daily.

Remember, effective OPAs grow organically through active use and continuous refinement. Whether you’re a startup documenting your first success or an established company streamlining operations, the time to capture and leverage your organizational knowledge is now.

We hope this helps you create and manage your OPAs efficiently!

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