3 Criteria Your SOP Management Software Needs to Meet

Once you're starting to think in that process driven mentality where you're realizing it's really important to start documenting your processes and your systems inside your business, you're probably wondering where exactly those SOPs or standard operating procedures need to go. And the fact is, even though I love to use ClickUp, that's what we make a lot of videos about on this channel. ClickUp is not the only tool that you can use to store your standard operating procedures. But without further ado, let's dive in. Where the heck do I put them? Well, my preference would be somewhere that is cloud based, centralized and easy to edit. Those are the main three criteria and anything that meets that criteria is a okay by me. So let's break down these requirements one by one and I'm going to recommend some specific tools if you're just kind of lost and don't know where to start. Cloud based is referring to stored on the Internet, meaning it's not on your individual computer. If your computer breaks, it's not lost. You can access these files from different sources because the actual content is on the Internet somewhere. The second element is centralized. Centralized is referring to simply having things all in one place. I don't mean one big document, although you certainly could, but at least that when you look for SOPs, you can find all of them within one search bar. Please avoid trying to create some SOPs in Loom, some SOPs in ClickUp, some SOPs in Notion, some SOPs in Google Docs. I'll talk about all these in a moment. But when you have to search five different places for an SOP5, that is a huge waste of time. Now, beyond just tool specific centralization, meaning all of your things are in the same software, I also want to suggest team based centralization. So if marketing department has SOPs and operations has SOPS and finance has SOPS, they should all be in the same place. Up to you. Whether you want to give everyone access to everything, you can lock it down if you want to, but I don't want you to be in a situation where, where John has sops on his computer, Susie has sops on Notion, Mark has sops in ClickUp, and then no one is able to share or really see what sops does the company have because they're all in these little silos. So that's what we mean by centralized. The second requirement for where to put your SOPs. Now, the final requirement for a SOP storage system is easy to edit. And this is the one that actually eliminates the vast majority of cloud based options out there. There are a lot of tools that allow you to store your processes, or they claim to at least, but when it actually comes to updating those SOPs, they make it really, really hard. When you're looking for someplace to store your processes, I want you to think about how easy it's going to be for someone to actually use and edit those sops. Use and edit. Remember that and being the operative word here. The biggest problem I see with SOP creation is that someone will create SOPs and then they're just going to sit somewhere, maybe Google Drive and collect dust and no one ever uses them, no one ever updates them. And then eventually a few years later you go through the whole process again of oh, I'm going to document my business, you update them all, and then again they sit and get dusty in your digital, you know, archive. That is what we want to avoid. There is no point in creating SOPs if people are not using them. And there's no point in people using them if they're not up to date. And if people are using them and not able to edit them, that's a recipe for making them out of date. So when we're thinking about ease of access and ease of use, what we're looking for here is something that will allow us to give people permission to view very easily the SOPs. We want it to be as little work as possible to have that SOP up on their screen as they're working. And we're looking for a tool that allows us to give someone the permission to edit an SOP. Maybe per SOP or per category of SOPs, depending on how your team works. We want those permissions in there because if someone's using an sop, they should have the right, or at least some kind of limited access to adjust that SOP for corrections and improvements that they identify as the worker be. So that's what ease of access is all about. Unless you are a very large business looking to build very rigid workflows that are the same every single time, and you're effectively looking for an ERP solution. You can learn more about this here if you want to, but if you don't know what that word means, odds are you are not that person. If you are a small team, less than 100 people in your business, you, you do not need that level of rigidity. Rather than looking at ERPs where everything is very defined and only a few people can edit it, I want you to think about creating SOPs and processes in a more flexible and open way where the worker can adjust the process and really grow it with their role as they get more experienced and as they find a better way. So, long story along, we've got cloud based, centralized and ease of use. What actually satisfies those requirements? Well, the most common choice would probably be Google Docs. Google Docs is cloud based. It is easy to centralize and you can give editing access to different persons. You could create a document per SOP or a document per section or department in your business to allow for easier searching. All you need to do is create the template, whether that's a template department or a template sop, and duplicate it as you create more processes and use the centralized search built into Google Docs to search for things that you need. Is that the only tool you can use? Of course, you could also use something like Excel or Google Sheets. As long as you're using the cloud based version of Excel. You could use Airtable, again, more of a spreadsheet approach. You could use Notion, which allows you to have different notes in your own fields. You could use something like ClickUp where you can create documents or even use task descriptions to create SOPs. Or you could use any of the other tools that allow you to document knowledge and collaborate with others in real time. There are far too many to count, but but Google Docs is probably the easiest one if you're just starting out. But if you don't use Google Docs or any of the tools I mentioned here, just look at the tool stack, the toolbox of technology you already have, and ask yourself, is any of this cloud based, centralized and easy to use and update? If you have something in your toolbox that could fill that role, use that instead. You do not need to use fancy software like Trainual or Process street in order to make this happen. In fact, Trainule and Process street tend to struggle on that ease of use and ease of access element, and they tend to not be the best choice for smaller teams. If you want to hear more about that though, just drop me a comment below. Maybe we'll create a separate video about those two options. Now the final tip I have for you today is to not overcomplicate this process. Keep it extremely simple, and do not try to worry about fancy technology. Once you have this content out of your head, which is the hard part, you can put it in any tool you want to. It's a copy and paste exercise. But if we never get this information out of our head because we're obsessing over the tool, well, we just wasted a bunch of time. Thanks so much for tuning in for this quick tip video. If you have additional questions that I wasn't able to cover in this brief video here, please do let me know in the comments. And while you're down there like and subscribe, please don't let the technology paralyze you on your process journey. And until we talk next, enjoy the process. SA.