Three "P's"

Recently I was in Oklahoma City and met Carla Hinton who is the staff religion editor for The Oklahoman. Carla Hinton and I spent a good hour talking (of which about nine minutes is captured on the video magazine below) about the importance of fiscal accountability among faith-based organizations and she gave me the opportunity to talk a little about the 3-P's.

I've been an guest lecturer, adjunct professor and part-time educator for a number of years, and somewhere along the way I started talking about how an organizational policies, practices and procedures are related.



The three "P's" that I talked about with Carla on the above video magazine that they produced are these same "Policies, Practices and Procedures". They are important for two important reasons.

The first reason is that well run organizations can be defined in a number of different ways including profits, revenue, satisfaction measurements, etc. One way is by saying that their polices, practices and procedures are fully aligned. It's easy for an organization or the board to create a policy. It's relatively simple as well to create a procedure, but for the policies and procedures to be fully aligned with daily practices is accomplished only with some measure of management skill, employee and board training and organizational tenacity.

Reason number two is that as organizations grow, it's important that the policies, practices and procedures are at a level that is commensurate with the size of the organization. This means that these three-P's need to grow and become more sophisticated and professional as the organization grows in size.

In particular, some human resource policies need to be developed once an organization starts having a number of full time employees. These employees need direction and oversight as well as employee benefits and the three-P's help keep them productive and motivated. Just as important, internal controls including the need for an external financial audit become more important as the organization grows. The policies, practices and procedures of an organization need to embrace the best practices of other large businesses as these organizations grow.

Fortunately some of the best run organizations (both for-profit and not-for profit) have been more than willing to share their best practices and with a simple Google search, newer and growing organizations can embrace these best practices. In a pinch, nonprofit organizations can always come to our website at http://www.ecfa.org/ and feast on any one of over 700 articles and best practices.