5 Standard Operating Procedure Mistakes to Avoid

So if you're watching this video, my guess is that you are getting ready to write your first or next standard operating procedure. Those standard operating procedures are just fancy lingo for recipes or instructions for how you do the things you do in your organization. Now, whether you are looking forward to this SOP writing with joy or dread, what is important is that you go into this adventure of SOPs with a plan. Just like if you're starting a new workout regimen and you go to the gym, you don't want to go to the gym and just grab the heaviest weight you see and start throwing it around. Same thing with SOPs. You don't want to just dive into the deep end and start creating SOPs based on nothing. You want a game plan. Just like at the gym, you want a workout plan. At ProcessDriven, we have helped thousands of teams systemize their operation. And one way we've done that is by helping them write standard operating procedures efficiently without making long rambling documents that no one checks. With that experience, we've learned a thing or two about what does and doesn't work when writing standard operating procedures for lean teams. So in this video, I'm going to break down five lessons we've learned. Five mistakes we've seen again and again and again, both internally and with our clients. To help you avoid these headaches, our goal is to help you write SOPs more quickly and ensure that the final result, the final SOP you have, is something that's going to be useful and effective for your team to actually use. I've got five for you to cover today and maybe some bonuses till you stay till the end. With that, let's just dive into mistake number one. Okay, here we are. So, first mistake we have, and I'm going to go into a digital whiteboard here to follow along. Our first mistake when it comes to SOPs is including too many variations. What I'm referring to here is when we have an SOP that includes every possible combination. So let's just say our SOP is how to get to grandma's house, right? For some reason, we want instructions for how to navigate people to this destination. If we wanted to provide clear instructions or we need to include clear step by step directions to achieve this result of getting to grandma's house. But if we include sections in our instructions for every possible bypass and turn off and alternative route that is possible, our SOP and our instructions will end up including so many options that it will be overwhelming to read, time consuming to create and understand, and ultimately not really instructions at all. It's just a list of possibilities as opposed to a directive. When we write our standard operating procedures, we want one SOP per path. So, for example, if we want to take it in a business context, if we have an SOP for how to send an invoice, we would want a separate SOP for how to cancel an invoice, or how to create an invoice for our product A or how to create an invoice for custom services. Every one of those pieces is its own unique SOP with the specific steps for that process. We do not want one invoicing SOP that includes how to cancel, how to create, how to edit, how to do it for every product, how to make exceptions, how to avoid invo. Those are all separate SOPs, separate paths to separate results. And so we need to document them separately so each one is bite size, clearly telling me where to go and not distracting me with nice to know information that I don't actually need in the moment. Mistake number one, too many variations. For more on that mistake, you can watch this video above, but let's get to example number two. Okay, mistake number two is having your SOPs not be skimmable. We want our SOPs to read like a Buzzfeed article because we want them to be very efficiently using our team's time. We don't want it to take longer to read the SOP than it is to do the actual process right. Our goal is to get the work done, not to have people reading a bunch of information. So when it comes to our instructions we provide, we want to provide them in a skimmable way. That means making sure we have headings, numbered steps, images where it saves time, quick links to resources. We want to create our SOPs as if we respect our team's time. Imagine that. And we want our SOPs to save people time by giving them what they need to know and not anything they don't. We want to have our headers equal to the results we want each person to achieve, ideally with collapsing sections that show more details if people need them. And we want to link out to additional resources or images only when it helps somebody send, save time, or get additional context. When we write our SOPs, we want them to feel more like a Buzzfeed article than an encyclopedia or Wikipedia entry. Okay, Header should tell me the result. Links should be quickly accessible. Everything should build around the convenience of finding information as opposed to whatever's the easiest to create. Now that's just two of the mistakes. Before I share a Few more. I do want to remind you that in order to make SOP mistakes, you actually need to have sop. So if you are someone who's sitting here and haven't yet written your first sop, we've got some goodies in the description for how we can actually help you get that jump started. We've got some free resources and at the time of recording, we also have a really cool event coming up where we'll be writing SOPs with you. If you'd like a little bit of hand holding and to work with me on that process information in the description below. But let me go back to mistake number three. Okay? Mistake number three is focusing too much on the ease of creation instead of the ease of retrieval. We want to make information easy to retrieve because when we write an sop, the goal is people will reference that recipe all the time. We only need to create the recipe one time and maybe edit it over time. If I think about an average standard operating procedure we have here at ProcessDriven, I would estimate it takes me about 20 minutes to write the SOP. And then with revisions over the course of maybe a year, a total of 60 additional minutes refining things that I find that I want to edit over the entire year. That's an hour and 20 minutes total spent on writing the SOP. Now, when we look at using the SOP, many of the SOPs we have here are read and referenced every week. That reading process might take anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes times 52 weeks. Now, I'm not going to attempt to do the math here live, but leave it to say we spend more time reading SOPs than we do writing them. So when we're deciding what format to use for our SOPs, we want to prioritize how easy they will be to consume. Formatting for ease of access means making sure you're using written words wherever possible, and editable words. I talk more about this in this video up here, but if you are someone using loom long video recordings of a 30 minute process, please stop doing that. Sure, you can do that to capture your process, but then take the time to write out the information as well. Rich media can be a fabulous way to capture more context of a process, but it's not something you should expect people to review every time they want to read that sop. As I talk about in that other video I already linked, you don't want to have somebody spend 30 minutes watching a video clip every time they need to do a five minute process. It's just not efficient instead have things easy to consume by having written information of the key steps. If you want to use videos and photos to make that even stronger, sure. But let's not rely on videos and screenshots that are a pain in the butt to view and update as our only form of SOPs. Now. The last mistake we talked about was focusing too much on input of information versus retrieval and one of the things I said was hey, write stuff. But conveniently, my fourth mistake is writing stuff. Thinking that just because you need to get things into writing means you need to type it all with your hands is is a false belief. There are so many tools out there now that can allow you to create SOPs without spending all that time typing that you should definitely leverage, particularly if you are not a fast typer. Some go to tools for making this happen might include Google Documents, turn the voice dictation feature, talk into the Google Doc, and voila as you talk through what you do, an SOP is written for you without you having to use your hand. Second option would be to use something like ChatGPT. Share with ChatGPT the process you're looking to do, maybe even share with it that Google Drive dictation you just did and then have chat GPT format that and turn that into a nice sop. Need more examples? Tools like Loom can allow you to capture your video and then get automated transcriptions with images at the relevant timestamps to fast track SOP creation. Need more? Sure. What about tool like Scribe where you can capture your process while you do it and it will create documentation for you. There are so many tools out here for this and depending on how techy you get, you can reduce the amount of human labor you want. If you prefer something very low tech, you can still leverage that here. Maybe you don't want to use any of this fancy tech stuff? Fine. Grab your kid or an assistant, sit them down in your chair and put them in front of a keyboard. That also works. All you do is show them what you're doing, either on a video call or by actually sharing your screen as they sit over your shoulder and have them write the sop again. You spare yourself the time of hands to keyboard and you get the extra benefit of someone else's brain asking good questions. And that is yet another technique for making sure that you can get things easily retrieved by having them in writing, while also making sure you're not slowing yourself down by your own typing speed. Particularly if you are someone who doesn't pride yourself on having a fast word per Minute, we'll have links to the tools I mentioned, by the way, in the description below. But with that, let's go on to mistake number five. Mistake number five is a little bit of a techy one, and it's just the error of duplicate data entry, meaning you are writing things multiple times in multiple places, making your life hell down the line when things inevitably change. Let's pretend we have some SOPs for creating our social media content. We have one for Instagram, we have one for Facebook, we have one for YouTube. Whatever. Each of these SOPs has steps about drafting the content unique to that platform, and it has a step about scheduling. And normal people will write in that SOP things such as schedule this post for noon at Eastern, because that's when we always schedule our YouTube posts, and they do the same thing in all of those other SOPs. Schedule this for two, schedule this for five, schedule this for Monday through Friday. You know, whatever the problem is, when the schedule changes all of a sudden, you would then have to go into every single one of these SOPs and update your schedule, which is something that we'd expect to change at least quarterly, if not more often. So how do we avoid that? This kind of retyping of relevant information, putting it in a lot of places, creates this versioning issue where when things change, we need to manually edit it in a ton of places because we've written the same information multiple times and in multiple spots. Instead of doing this kind of mistake, my suggestion for you is to create some linking together. Essentially, we want to avoid writing any information that will change directly in documentation of any kind. Rather than having your SOP say schedule at 12pm, instead have the SOP step say schedule according to Master Calendar link. That Master Calendar link is a link that goes to one area where you have your full schedule for what your current posting norm is. If you change up when you post your YouTube videos, for example, that calendar is where you would update things, but you wouldn't have to touch the other 15 SOPs that might mention posting times, because they're all connected back to that Master calendar. By ensuring your information is only written one time in one place when you update it, you only need to update it one time. Whereas if you duplicate this information and manually type it everywhere, you make your life a lot harder down the line when things inevitably change. That's mistake number five, duplicate data. So in this video, you've learned five mistakes when it comes to writing SOPs, but mistakes themselves are not, you know, what we need to focus on? We need to focus on those results. So if you'd like to learn a little bit more about how to write said sops, we've got those goodies in the description I mentioned earlier where we have some templates, some resources, some inspiration, and yes, a live event where you can actually work with me on writing your SOPs at the time of recording. So check out the description if you want some details on that, but otherwise be sure to watch this video next where we go over what exact SOP structure we suggest you start off with. Thanks so much for watching and enjoy the process.