hi christian everyone welcome to the principles of temple administration course today we're going to be discussing documentation and we're going to be looking at different types and also the importance of documentation documentation is a is a foundational principle for keeping anything usable for the present and for future access so it's because of documentation in the past that we're able to actually smoothly take advantage of the present in cali hugo when the memory power is very low and as we know it's often very much failing us then it's of paramount importance that we document all important
activities different case studies and different processes that way everything is on file and can be accessed so an overview of today's course documentation and our tradition advantages of the process of documentation different levels of documentation different kinds of documentation the life cycle of records office security and the objectives of this course is our intention is by the end or conclusion of this course your you will understand the origin and advantages of documentation the difference between various types of documentation you'll know how to keep records according to the life cycle and provide proper security for key
documents okay so what is some of the history of documentation according to our philosophy or culture uh cali yuga began shilov yasudev he compiled all the vedic literature which was previously only spoken so srila yasidev took that which was spoken and he wrote it down so this is some of the beginnings of documentation also the past times of sri caitanya mahaprabhu many times we might see that sri chaitanya mahaprabhu was just in jagannath poori before the rathatra card and in front of lord jagannath and he's just dancing and chanting in ecstasy but actually caitanya mahaprabhu
was very very much concerned about the documentation of the philosophy of krishna consciousness he spent so much time instructing shula rupa goswami and by the mercy of sri caitanya mahaprabhu's conversation with srila rupa goswami and his instruction to write books we have the upadeshi mrita nectar of instruction and the bhakti-rasamrita sindhu nectar of devotion lord caitanya also instructed sri sanatan goswami so in this way we can see that sri caitanya mahaprabhu was trying to preserve the legacy of krishna consciousness and bhakti yoga and he did that through his empowered representatives who were not only practitioners
but who were dedicated to the process of documentation and then of course who else came sheila prabhupada and he took this process of documentation in our lineage of acharyas and by shiloh bhaktisinanta the example of srila bhaktivinodakore and srila prabhupada did the same thing by writing so many books documenting the processes of the practice of krishna consciousness so his endeavor was documentation and the result was a flawless philosophy why because all the way back to sri lanka things were written down then mr caitanya mahaprabhu again documented and written down and then srila prabhupada was able
to take all of the acharya's commentaries everything had already been written down and he was able to then present krishna consciousness in such a pure way so this is the power of documentation so what are some of the advantages of the process of documentation so generally we can understand that it it clears out any vagueness or uncertainty because everything's already written down first and foremost reason for documenting any process is the fact that it reduces operational ambiguity means that confusion or misunderstanding around how we perform a certain operation is immediately diminished because it's all clearly
there in black and white so the next time there's some confusion regarding who's supposed to do what where when and how the best practices for following which task needs to be performed one can look at the detailed documentation and the dispute becomes easily resolved so these documents act as a storehouse of collective organizational knowledge regarding the processes and can be accessed by anyone in times of need it can also become training material so once you document the best practices this documentation can then be used to create training material in order to prepare persons who are
going to take up any specific services within the within the temple the documentation also becomes source for analysis which means if things are written down in black and white then they become available for us to analyze and we can use this in order to make better decisions in order to have continual improvement and in order to to train so it becomes a source for analyzation and also it can be compared from version to version because sometimes in the process of continual improvement which we'll discuss in later chapters then we need to have data in order
to analyze so if we document more things the more we're going to be able to look back and and analyze them it also becomes as mentioned a platform for future improvement so as we know continual improvement is a very important aspect if we want to improve we have to document what we were doing before so here's a little diagram that shows the process of documentation that's coming on your screen now you can have a look at this and see this process of documentation one of the foundations of process documentation especially with iso is that you
write what you do and you do what you write i'll say that again you write down what it is that you're doing and then you just make sure that you do what you have written down i'm going to say that one more time just for good luck because it's important that we understand this we write down what it is that we're doing this is the process and i'm writing it down then we just simply have to do what we write if we do this for simple things let's say a recipe you get a really good
recipe you write it down and then in order to duplicate replicate and you know do that process again you simply have to follow what was written down so it's a very important foundational point so there are different levels of documentation we're going to get into discussing now we have a pyramid diagram here and you see at the very bottom there's forms and records then there's work instructions then there's procedures and then there's the qms manual quality management system manual so the quality management system manual is something that's a bit separate from a general manual that
you would have and this is something that if your temple or center is inspired to become iso 9001 certified then this is a requirement and what what it is is this quality management system manual will basically give you several important points that have to be in place in order for your temple or center to be certified at such a high level things like a policy statement of the temple achievable objectives for for one year for different processes and you also have have to have an appointed quality manager so this may not necessarily pertain to everyone
but it's an important important aspect to understand as we develop our documentation so here's another diagram that shows the basic functions of a process so we have the needs to come in to the process and ultimately what comes out the other side we hope is satisfaction we've satisfied the needs of the persons who wanted to see the process but process is made up of different activities and each activity is then broken down into a variety of tasks and then each task can be broken down into a variety of operations so what are process manuals they're
a combination of procedures and work instructions now procedures consist of purpose and scope responsibility a definition and related documents and a flow of documents from top to bottom means process activities and tasks so work instructions consist of details from tasks to operation and this all makes sense if you're looking at this diagram of these different types of tasks and operations so work instruction consists of details from task to operation and like that then you have other documentation so for any process there are four different types of contributors methods indicators human resource and material resource so
we have the output that we might want is we want to cook a nice offering the input is that here's what time it needs to be done here's what we'd like to see at the output then we have a method so where we're going to cook we're going to cook in the kitchen we're going to cook on the flame we're going to cook in this pot we're going to cook in that indicators there may be how something looks the color if you're making haliva has the has the semolina brown nicely human resource you need people
to cook you need people to have done the shopping you need people to have made sure that the offering is going to happen on time and then material resources is of course the different ingredients the boga and supplies like that so now we have all this documentation where we're going to keep it generally you would keep it in your office so there has to be some office security so in order to keep all these documents private and personal there must be proper office security there must be safeguards and protocols in place for all the varieties
of different documentation that you have at the different levels of security that are required there should be some sort of risk analysis performed for the different documents and accordingly proper security measures should be taken so this pretty much covers documentation the scope is huge you can get into so many different areas this is uh you know for the most part as far as we're going to go there are many things more that you could look into to improve or increase the keeping of documentation we encourage you to do that for your own betterment and for
the betterment of the temple so in summary we sincerely hope that you understand now the benefits of keeping good documentation the different types of documentation and that you'll be able to implement this in your templar center we thank you very much for your time and for your attention hari krishna
