Writing SOPs Essentials
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Why SOPs are important
• SOPs must clearly communicate the processes of your business to
standardize operations and ensure profitability, quality, and efficiency.
These manuals can serve other purposes – to impose a set of rules,
defining roles and relationships, guarding against the loss of key
personnel, compliance, and more.
Their most important function is to make sure your staff do things
right. Manuals should describe how to do things in clearly defined
steps, and you need to create a SOP for every process.
Step 1: Decide how to format
your SOPs
• You can choose from a variety of structures and formats when it comes to presenting
your standard operating procedures. Large companies will probably want to adhere to
the international standard ISO 9000 or something similar.
• It’s not required to follow international rules to write a good standard operating
procedure. You can write a SOP with the following structure:
• Intro
• Summary
• Details
• Overview
• Related checklists
• The format you choose depends on a number of variables – as a large company, you’ll
need to have SOPs that adhere to the company’s internal policies and standardizations.
As a solopreneur, in contrast, you’ll likely lean towards a much simpler presentation.
Step 2: Bring together the
relevant stakeholders
• SOPs shouldn’t be created in a vacuum. If you’re creating them to
document particular workflows, tasks and processes then you should
communicate clearly with the people already in charge of performing
them.
If you manage a team already working each day on the tasks you want
to document, you should get an idea of best practices from them and
incorporate these into your SOPs. Creating your processes
collaboratively not only brings more expertise and scrutiny over the
work, but the people following your SOPs will feel more of a sense of
ownership over them.
Step 3: Discover your purpose
• Think about what you want to achieve as you create your standard operating
procedures. If they are completely new, then you are trying to build functional
systems. If you want them to function well, then you’ll need to make sure the
priorities of the processes align with business priorities.
If your SOPs are documenting existing workflows and processes, then you need
to consider what your pain points are. If your existing processes are letting you
down, then you need to figure out what you can do to change them. The current
system may be too slow or producing a product that’s not of sufficiently high
quality.
You’ll need to create a detailed process breakdown of the tasks involved and
ensure the standards are met every time the task is completed.
Step 4: Identify the structure of
your SOPs
• In a large company, your standard operating procedure will be structured as a formal report,
including a cover page with the title and related reference materials, followed by a list of chapters
and the process itself.
In a small company, your SOPs are likely to be much less formal. Decide on a common sense
structure and follow it for all your SOPs.
Here’s a list of example structures:
• Neatly formatted narrative
• Step-by-step bulleted or numbered lists
• Tables
• Step-by-step photos
• Step-by-step graphics
• Flowcharts
• One-page graphics
• Checklists
Step 5: Define the scope of the
procedure
• If you’re formulating a set of standard operating procedures for the
product team’s work, you should focus on them and their needs. You
need to understand where to draw the line to stop you from straying
into the remit of other teams or departments.
• A workflow may in fact involve multiple teams but you should know
from the start whether this is the case. Clearly define the limits of
your work or you’ll end up with scope creep.
Work out what you’re dealing with – what action defines the
beginning of the process? What action signals the end of the process?
Defining your scope is essential to creating a successful SOP.
Step 6: Use a consistent style
• It’s worth saying again that if you’re working for a large corporation your soaps are going
to be a lot more formal than your startup team of three. Whether you’re going to be using
professional formal language or not depends upon the setting you’re in.
• The following tips are applicable no matter what company you work for:
• Begin with action commands – always use a verb at the beginning of a statement for a
task. This kind of language clearly communicates what you have to do and is impactful for
your audience.
Be concise – make an effort not to digress in a SOPs manual. Ensure your writing is clearly
and transmits only the most essential information.
Make it scannable – don’t make your readers sift through paragraphs of text to find what
they need in your SOPs. Include the actionable sections first and put the explanation
afterwards. Use headers to break up your text.
Step 7: Work out the necessary
steps in the process
• This is the step where you put in the hard work of laying out your SOP.
Walk through the procedure from start to finish noting down every
step in the process. Ask for input and discussion across the team, and
note down any extra steps that are suggested.
Once you have the skeleton of the procedure, go through and
examine each task you have recorded and figure out if any sub-tasks
are required. Are there any steps of the procedure that require
further explanation? Spell it out in a subtask.
Step 8: Assess potential
problems in your process
• Once you’ve written your process down, it’s time to work out where
things are likely to go wrong. Where is failure likely to happen when
executing your SOP?
If you’re using your SOP to document a manufacturing process, you
can run the calculations to see whether your SOP works properly.
Maybe your process leads to high output in terms of production but
has problems when it comes to distribution? Every business is
different and problems are likely to occur in unique ways.
Step 9: Test your SOP
• Now you’ve finished your SOP it’s time to see whether it actually
works in practice. Ask the people who are actually following your
instructions to test them out and find any bugs in the process.
We’ll look at a sales example – say you have a team of 10 and you set
3 people to follow the new procedure. This controlled test of the new
SOPs will allow you to gather comparative data on the performance of
the new and existing model.
• If you’re happy that your new business process is superior to the
previous one then you can implement it straight away.
Step 10: Launch your SOP into
the world
• Your SOP is now ready to be finalized and implemented in your
business. If you’ve followed these instructions from beginning to end
then your SOPs are guaranteed to improve your operations.
Once your standard operating procedure is complete, you need to
communicate the new manuals to your team and ensure they are
followed.
• Create and implement a roll-out plan and inform staff that SOPs are
changing. Hold launch events and training to introduce the new SOPs
to your staff.
