What is the difference between process and procedure?

Answer 1

There are a number of procedures within a process. A process requries a set of procedures. It means that you take actions to get results. The actions you take are your set of procedures (ISO). Procedures / actions / activities / work instructions all describe the lowest level of decomposition ie: the procedure cannot be broken down further.

-- These terms can be defined differently in terms of different scenario. In a Quality perspective, Process is the set of action items to achieve the work completion and procedure is further decomposition of process to ensure the quality.

In boiling it all down, I have found that the best means of comparison is this: A Process defines what is to be done, and a Procedure describes how (the steps involved) the activities of the process are to be performed. A good illustration would be that an organization has to define, for example, the process of software testing. In so doing, there are inputs (Requirements), activities (Test Planning and Execution) and outputs (Test Analysis Report). The objective of the process model is to show that an organization is meeting the generally prescribed testing activities in addition to performing adequate planning, review and approval along the way. Once the process has been accepted, the organization will then drill into each of the activities on the process diagram and annotate the actual steps (procedures) that will reflect the activity and produce the desired output.