The communication process
Policies define boundaries, set rules, and give the direction for an individual or group to take within an organization. A process, meanwhile, addresses the means of achieving the objective as directed by the policy. A process can be defined as a series of coordinated actions aimed towards achieving a preset goal. For a process, there are inputs, a trigger to set it in motion and an objective that it needs to achieve or you could call it the output of a process. It is the policy in action.
The idea of a "process" can be elucidated with the following example:
You are told by your manager that a weekly project report needs to be sent out to the customer from the following week. Preparing a report is a process, as there is a series of interconnected activities that string together to bring out specific output.
In this example, the manager's instructions got you started on preparing the report, so this becomes the trigger for the process. A process needs inputs to churn...