Procedures and SOPs

What an SOP is

A standard operating procedure is one process written down, step by step, so that any competent person in the business can run it and get the same result. It names who does it, what has to be true before it starts, what happens at each step, who decides at the points where there is a decision, and what to do when something goes wrong. Its real purpose is survival: the process outlives the person who invented it.

It is not training material. An SOP assumes the reader knows the job and needs the steps in the right order; training assumes no knowledge and teaches. It is also not a policy. A policy says what is allowed and who is accountable. A procedure says how the thing is actually done on a Tuesday afternoon.

When you need one

You need one when a single person is the only one who can do something and they would like a holiday. You need one when the same job is done four different ways by four people and the results vary in ways customers notice. And you need one when you are about to hire, and the current training plan is sitting next to Dave for a week and hoping.

You do not need one for work that changes every time and depends entirely on judgement; writing that down produces a document nobody follows and everybody resents. And if the process you want captured is specifically how content gets briefed, written, approved and published, editorial process training does that job properly, with the handover session included rather than just the document.

Getting it out of their head

This is the hard part, and it is worth being honest about why. The person who invented the process cannot describe it. They have done it so many times that half of it has become automatic, so they skip steps without knowing they skipped them. Asked at a desk, they describe the version they intend to follow rather than the one they follow. And they cannot say why they do several things, only that it goes wrong when they do not.

• The recorded walkthrough. They do the job for real, on a real case, while I record and interrupt. Never an interview about the job. What they do and what they say they do are different documents.
• The second pass on the decisions. Every point where they chose something gets revisited: what would have made you choose the other way. This is where the conditions that were never written down come out.
• The draft. Numbered steps, plain verbs, one action each, with the decision points marked and the inputs each step needs named.
• The cold run. Somebody else in the business follows the draft on a live case with no help from the expert and no help from me. Every stall, question and guess is recorded.
• The rewrite. The steps that stalled get rewritten. Usually two or three steps carry almost all of the trouble, and they are rarely the steps anybody predicted.

What you get

The procedure. One to four pages in an editable document: purpose, who runs it, what must be in place first, the numbered steps, the decision points written as conditions, and a short section on what to do when the usual path is blocked.

The exceptions list. The cases the standard procedure does not cover, with the name of the person who decides each. This is what stops an SOP being abandoned the first week reality fails to cooperate.

The owner and review date. One line at the top naming who owns the procedure and when it gets read again. A procedure with no owner is out of date within a year and quietly ignored for the four after that.

A worked example

An illustration. A landscaping company near Kelowna quotes about 20 residential jobs a month, and the owner does every quote himself because nobody else can price a slope. He wants to hand quoting to his two foremen before spring.

Three site visits are recorded, start to finish, including the two minutes he spends walking the property boundary while saying almost nothing. The draft comes out at three pages and 14 steps. A foreman then takes it to a real property with no help and stalls at step nine, which says to allow for access. He has no idea what counts as difficult access, because the owner had never put a number on it, only a feeling. The rewrite turns step nine into three conditions about gate width, slope and the distance from the truck to the work, all of which the owner could state once he was asked the right way. The exceptions list has four entries, one of which is any property with a retaining wall, which still goes to the owner. He does eight quotes in March instead of twenty.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which process, who runs it now, and what goes wrong when somebody else tries. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. How many procedures, agreed before anything starts.
3. The recorded walkthroughs. One to three sessions with the person who owns the process, while they do the work rather than describe it.
4. The draft. Within five to eight working days per procedure.
5. The cold run. A colleague follows the draft unaided on a live case, watched, with no rescuing. This is the step clients most often want to skip and the one that earns the money.
6. Delivery. The rewritten procedure, the exceptions list, and a named owner with a review date in the calendar.

Two to three weeks for a single procedure, longer where a set of related processes is being written together.

What it costs

Procedures are not one of the published bands on the pricing page, so the work is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. What moves it is the number of procedures, how much of the process is judgement rather than sequence, and whether the person who owns it can be booked for recording without a fortnight of negotiation. The number is fixed in writing before anything begins.

What happens next

A procedure tells somebody who knows the job what to do next; it does not teach the job, so a new hire usually needs a workbook and somebody to run it built on top of the procedure. Where a process crosses several people and stalls at sign-off, the thing to write next is the approval path itself. And once procedures exist, somebody has to own them and set review dates, which is governance in one page rather than forty. Each procedure is finished work on its own, and nothing further is assumed.