5 Ways to Define a Workflow in SmartSuite with SOPs

So you finally reached a point where you know what your process is. That is celebration worthy. But now we need to grapple with the reality that even if we know what our process should be, we need to remember to do all of the steps in the right order. And I don't know about you, but that's typically where my best intentions fall apart. That's why today I'm going to be taking you inside SmartSuite, the sponsor of today's video, and show you how you can take your process that you've mapped out or you've defined in your head and then put it inside your work management software, connect it to sops or instructions for how to do those things, and make it very clear, both for your future self and your teammates, what you need to do, in what order and how exactly to do those things. So the first step in our five step journey for getting our process into our work management software and equipping it with SOPs is to figure out where we want to build. Now, I've worked with over 1200 teams on the question of building out their work management software. And for most of them, I suggest they start their journey in SmartSuite with a general solution that they can use to put all of their tasks together. We call that a capacity defense area at ProcessDriven. But you might have something like this that you call your task management area or your general to DOS area, whatever you call it. That is generally going to be a good spot to put this process and template work that we're talking about. However, as you get more advanced in SmartSuite, you're probably going to want to start developing solutions per purpose built to solve a specific problem. And that's the example we're going to assume today. Let's just say we want to make sure that we are organizing our content campaign planning like we talked about up in this video. And that is the specific process we want to focus on putting inside of SmartSuite. And we don't want it to just go in our general to do area. We want a specialized zone and use all the features available to make this really structured. If that's the case for you, with maybe your service, your offer, your HR stuff, whatever your main process is, we want to start off by having some kind of template or starting point to give us a drop zone for our process, a place for our process to be added. As you've probably seen in most of our videos, I would suggest starting with the SmartSuite template library. And in this case I've already added One called content marketing, which is the one I'll be using for this example. But regardless of where you're at now, make sure before you move on in this video, you have a spot where you can put this process in SmartSuite. Either your general area, which is where I recommend most people start, or if you're a little bit more advanced, a specialized solution or area in SmartSuite. So. So have you gotten that first piece down? Do we have a spot in our work management software to put this stuff? Okay, if you have that, then our next step is going to be to go to the opposite extreme and check in on your process. Is our process clear enough that we can do the transfer? It's like a transplant, right? So if you're at this video, I'm guessing you have. But if you haven't yet defined what your process is, you might want to go up to this video next and make sure that you map out that process in detail. Mapping out a process might look like creating a whimsical flowchart like I have on the screen. It could be using your physical whiteboard and just mapping out the steps, or it could be just taking a piece of paper and writing, 1, 2, 3. These are the things I need to do. Whatever format works for your brain. What I want you to have by the end of this step is something like what you see here. You need to have a clear understanding of all of the little pieces that go into your process. And here's the bonus piece. Names for the major phases or chunks. For very simple processes, where there's only, you know, four steps or so, you might not need all that because it's so simple. The phases are the names of the steps. But for larger processes, which are typically what we're dealing with when we're trying to bake them into our software, we want to give ourselves some kind of milestones, some key steps along the way, to define a whole section of work into bigger chunks. So that's your homework for this step. Define these steps that you go through in order to accomplish this thing. Build this widget, serve this client, and then give us some defining names or chunks for the key phases. We want to aim for less than five here, a little higher, a little lower if you want, but somewhere in that categories what we're aiming for. Once you have all of that ready, we're ready to move on to step number three, which is making sure the stuff we've defined in our process here, particularly these phases, have a place to go inside of SmartSuite. Basically everything in this process that requires someone to do something, someone to track something, something to be, I don't know, categorized. We need a spot for that inside of SmartSuite. And transferring this data from our process map into SmartSuite is where we start to have some options available to us. And I know, I know sometimes having options for how you can go about things can make you feel unsure, maybe insecure, not sure which path is right. But don't worry, as I go through all four of these, I'll also let you know which is going to be best for which situation. So it should be pretty clear. And if you're still stuck, comments below, happy to help. So when it comes to organizing our process in SmartSuite, there are, I mean, infinite possibilities, but there are really four big ones that I think are going to be most appropriate for this level use case. The way I'm going to categorize these options is by how those phases we talked about back at the process step, how do they manifest? What do they look like in SmartSuite? So our four options are option number one, sub items per phase, where we take the major phases and we break them out as sub items. Option 2, checklist item per phase, such as having a checklist box for each of the phases in our process. Option three, which is having a unique field for each phase, tracking the progress or the sub progress of the activities in each phase of the journey. And finally we have option four, which is Linked Record per phase. And this is where we would link records elsewhere that represent each of these tasks or items or pieces of the puzzle and connect them using the Linked Record feature to this particular record. So we'd kind of connect one database with another, make things be happy. Those are our four options. And when it comes to taking your process and putting it inside SmartSuite, it can be a little confusing to know. Okay, well, where should mine go? Should it be a checklist? Should it be a sub item? Should it be something else? So let's break down why you would do each of these subitems, which is created by adding a field called subitems to your given record and then formatting what fields you want to have is a great option for anyone who wants to have these phases each contain their own fields. So normally, you know, when we have a record like this, there's fields in them, these things, status owner, all these things that we can create. But when we create subitems, we basically create unique records inside the records. They're kind of nestled in there. And with that we can add unique fields that are only relevant for the subitems. For example, if we wanted to have a checkbox, an approval step for each of these milestones, we can add a yes no field to each of these subitems here. So we'll just say approved yes or no. And that field will be added to every subitem we have here, but it will not be added to the overall record or other records in this app. It's kind of like adding a database within your overall database. And when you have subitems or phases that have really unique fields you want to track separately, this can be a great way to go. However, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. There are two limitations about the subitems approach which prevents it from being the perfect, perfect choice for everyone. When it comes to sub items. You do not have the ability to add the lovely and powerful assigned to field. If I go over here and add a new field and I look for assigned to, currently it's not available. Why does that matter? Well, our magical assigned to field like you see up here at the record level, this is what determines who is the owner of that thing. And that ownership is what determines whether or not this record or task or in this case campaign shows up at the top in someone's my work section where they see what their work is for for a given day. So if you require ownership or someone to be in charge of a given phase and get reminded and treat them like due dates and assignments, it kind of breaks down for sub items here you would have to make sure you had ownership at the overall record level in order to have that visibility or that reminder to yourself or to John or to Susie that hey, I need to do the planning, you know, and there's not really a great way to do that right now with subitems. I hope that changes very soon, but currently not quite there now. The second limitation when it comes to subitems is the fact that you cannot create default subitem values. So if I go into field settings here, you'll notice there's settings and help text that is different than other fields in SmartSuite such as this one, where you can go into field settings and there's a default value available. Love this feature. I'm kind of addicted to it. And the fact that we cannot set defaults for subitems makes me a little bit not on team. Subitem defaults allow you to say every time a new record is created, have these certain things there. And for someone who, who has many campaigns, and each one has the same 4 sub items. Not being able to set that automatically is a little bit of a constraint. So in conclusion, subitems are going to be great if you are someone that wants to have specific fields and if you have a process where you're tracking information on each step of the journey, but these aren't all being assigned to or divvied out to separate assignees and separate owners. If you need that, well, let's go to option number two. Option number two is checklist item per phase. And it's exactly what it sounds like it means. We create a checklist by going into any relevant area and adding a checklist field, calling it either checklist or whatever else you want to call it Steps in this case and adding it into our flow. Great thing about checklists is that it's approachable. It keeps everything really consolidated. And you can also solve the problem we had before in that every checklist item allows you to assign and date out that particular step and that particular piece of ownership. So unlike with subitems, we can make sure that whoever's in charge of creation is reminded that, hey, it's creation time. The other nice thing about checklists is that you can really break it down as granularly as you want. So if you want to just go phases, you're good. If you want to break the phases down into steps where it's step one, step two, every little piece of that process you have, if you want that to be its own checklist item, you can do it as well as make all of those finer details a default option for next time or for the next campaign, and so on. The only downside when it comes to checklists in SmartSuite is that checklists currently do not have their own fields besides assignee and due date. So if you wanted to track things like whether it's approved or not, or other structured data that you'd normally have in its own field, like we have up in subitems land. You will not be able to do that with checklists. Checklists are simply much simpler than subitems. This option is going to be great for anyone with a repeatable process or a simple one off project. I think checklists are probably my favorite go to field when it comes to SmartSuite. If I don't know know what I'm going to add, I'll usually do a checklist. That's option two. Next up we have option three, which is fields per phase. In this step, what we're going to do is take the phases or the major milestones in our process from before and turn each one of them into their own field. For example, the planning phase of our project could become a dropdown field going through the statuses of planning, whereas maybe our scheduling one. We don't need all of these pieces. Maybe we want it to be a checklist because we have multiple people each owning a different step of it. We want to break out scheduling as a checklist. Maybe we get to the content creation phase and we want to break that out as linked records or subitems. And maybe we get to the review stage and all we're tracking there is this approval field signed and filled in or not Using the signature field in SmartSuite as you might have gathered just by this example here, the beauty of using fields per phase or step is that you have tons of customization. You can use whatever is best for a given phase. For planning, it might be different than scheduling. For approval, it might be different than retrospectives. But we've got all of the SmartSuite field types at our disposal to make sure that we can find the one that's the perfect fit for each chunk of the process or each step of the process, depending on how granular you want to be. Plus, because we have so much flexibility here, pretty much every field we would want to incorporate we have the option to modify those field settings and add those default default values to make things easier for the future. All of this combined makes for a reporting dream and makes you have a really impressive looking and powerful SmartSuite setup. However, it's not all perfect here either. With this setup, there is no implied sequence to these steps and there's no assignee assigned to particular pieces. You would need to create additional fields or additional instructions for that kind of piece. What do I mean by that? Let me just show you. When we're in our process map, we have a clear flow of planning creating scheduling. When we're in some of the alternative options like up here, we've got a clear flow of planning, creation scheduling. When we have things as fields, it can be easy to work out of order and make it unclear as to who owns a given field. Yes, we could adjust permissions to account for that in some way, but no amount of permissions currently will prevent us from maybe confirming before this is complete. We would need to set up separate automations or other controls to make sure things go in a chronological order because a sequence is not really implied when you have fields for each piece. I would say option three here is going to be Best for niche pipelines. What I mean by that, repeatable processes that are really, really well established. For example, my YouTube production flow here at ProcessDriven, we've got a pretty solid process. It doesn't change often. It's always the same, and the same four people work on it all the time. And so if we had something like this and we need to remember which things happened first, I would feel confident that those four people would all know what happens in what order, because it's very consistent and it's very established. I would not use this approach in flexible projects, projects where there's lots of come and go, lots of new people coming in. I think it might be a little confusing to keep things in the right order. Now that brings me to option number four, our fourth way to get our process into SmartSuite. And that is using a linked record per phase or step or task, whatever chunk you want to do to do that. What we're going to do is go into any relevant field, add a field, and add a linked record field. This is the only field that is as beloved as checklist fields for me in SmartSuite. And this allows us to relate records in different places together to establish dependencies, to establish relationships. Just to say these two things have something to do with each other. In this case, I have created records over here in my other content area for each of the steps I need to go through, and I'm connecting them with that linked record relationship to this particular thing. The beauty of this networking together is we have pretty much every possibility available to us in this setup. If we wanted to have checklist items or fields or sub items, we can still do that, because all we've done here is create the phases or the major chunks of our process as their own records. So inside planning, we could break this down with a million new custom fields if we wanted to. We could do anything we want from this place by building up a little higher in the hierarchy and giving each phase its own record in its own space to breathe. Because of that flexibility, this setup also works really well, regardless of whether you're trying to track tasks such as maybe each of these phases needs to have an assignee and a due date. If you needed those task management features, you could do it here. And this kind of relational work also works really well for data, where, just like we talked about with subitems, you're not tracking assignments, but you are tracking information. This works in both setups. The major cons with this particular setup is twofold. First, just like with subitems we do not yet have the ability to have default values here. We would need to use an automation or some other kind of setup to make sure those are added. Additionally, when we do this setup, generally we want to have these particular pieces in their own app or area and that can add a little bit of complexity to your setup. You no longer have just campaigns all consolidated like the other options. You end up having two areas, you know, steps we need to do and campaigns and networking them together in two separate apps in order to do this setup. So it can be a little bit more spread out. In SmartSuite, those are the cons. But overall, despite those cons, I would say if you have a more complex project, a more complex process, this would be my go to method. Checklists would be great if it was simple, but if you need anything that's a little bit more sophisticated than a checklist can handle, this would be how I would be setting things up. Well, that was a lot, wasn't it? That was all just step three. And yeah, it was one of those brainy ones. But once you figure out which option fits your process based on how complex or simple it is based on the variables I shared before and if you need to review those. By the way, the link to the blog version of this video is below and you can find the chart that I showed on the screen in case you want to reference it. But once you figure that out and you decide where you're heading, you just need to create those structures. So inside of SmartSuite it would be creating your sub items, creating your checklists, creating those fields by going to any existing field and clicking Add New field, or just scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the record and adding a new field this way. Once you do that, you can add the pieces that you need based on your answer to the last step and then we're ready for this step. In this step, we've got another light journey. We just need to have one place to put our equipment or our SOPs. In this case, for our process. What I mean by that is if you have instructions like a Standard Operating Procedure or sop, or maybe you have templates, resources, guidance, brand guides. If you have things that help people do a particular step or a phase of your journey, then let's make sure we have a way to connect that to the process you built. In the last step, we need to have a spot for those instructions. The most common type of instructions we'll see businesses in your position have is probably going to be an SOP those standard operating procedures or instructions I talked about earlier. To network those together, we need to find a spot to put them in SmartSuite. If you do not already have a spot, I would suggest creating an app such as this one where you can track all of your SOPs in one centralized app and network them throughout your entire account. If you don't know how to do that, or if you'd like to learn more about the SOP setup, you can check out this video up at the top. Here we go. You can see I have got a simple app with SOPS as records in SmartSuite. When I open these records, I get our document. Now, I know this isn't your turn, your traditional looking document, it's a more structured record. But this is where we're going to put our document of information about our procedure for a given process. Ooh, and if the SOP layout, like what fields do you need? How are they set up? If that's a little confusing for you, just know that you can find an SOP template for free in the description or comments area below this video and you can just get that and install it into your SmartSuite account to get you a running start. Particularly making sure your procedure and steps are set up in a lightweight way that that trips people up. So hopefully that free resource will help you with all of that. But anyway, once you've got that in your account, you've got your spot for all of your SOPs. We are ready to move on to our final step finally, which is just connecting the process that we built in one of those four methods with our records filled with SOPs. Because SmartSuite's so powerful, there are a few ways we can go about connecting these sops to your process. And just like before, the best choice is going to be different, depending on the process, depending on the business, depending on what you need. So I want to give you all the options here and let you choose what's best for you. Rather than give some generic prescription that may not work the best, I want you to find what works for you. So let's talk about the ways to connect these sops to these campaigns. They're in two different solutions in SmartSuite. How do we make them talk to each other? Well, five options for you. If I just scroll on down to my SOP options here, you'll see option number one is pretty straightforward. It's using a website or URL field and putting my SOP link into that field. This is done by adding a new field wherever you would normally add one and go ahead and add a link or URL field. Adding that and then choosing the option to allow multiple links is what's going to give you the setup you see on the screen. Once we have this established, we can use copy and Paste to open up a record, grab either the URL from the URL bar or the link from this and then pasting it into our field that we created previously. And we could add multiple ones here we can add 50, 60, doesn't matter. We can just keep adding links into this structured field. This is a great option because it's super simple, it's somewhat structured and you can kind of report on it, right? It's not as pretty as we might like, but it does let us say, hey, is the SOP filled in or is it blank? If it's blank, hey, we can see that. So we have a little bit of binary. Yes. No reporting possible. The cons or downsides to this method is the fact that it's pretty ugly, right? It doesn't tell us what the name of the record is that we're about to click on. It just shows us that this big ugly link. I would say this option is going to be great for ease of use, making it very easy to set up, particularly if a given app has different sops per record. But it's not my favorite option. That brings us to option number two. Option number two, like we talked about before, is using that linked record field, connecting SOPs in one area with a record in this area. So here I'm going to click link from record and I can choose all of the sops I have in that library and connect them together. I can create this field by going wherever I can normally add a field, adding a linked Record field, and during the time of setup, choosing my SOP area. At this point I can choose whether to allow multiple records, which I would suggest, and I would go ahead and add that field in. You can also modify this field setting to display it in a little bit more of a compact way if you'd prefer something a little bit more minimal and less overwhelming. But regardless of which format you choose, this Linked Record option is the most stylish option we have for keeping track of SOPs versus records. They do work a lot like two way hyperlinks, but they're pretty. They show you the name of the record on both sides and they allow us to report on them very clearly so we can easily see and roll up how many relationships are there. When were they last updated? It's very Reportable. The downside of this link record approach is that default values are not available. I know, right? Maybe in the very near future, but right now we cannot have a default set here. So if we want to have this added in, we're going to need to look to automations or manual work to add this link in. For folks that have a hard time getting their team to use or be aware of SOPs, this might limit your usage of this. So my suggestion would be to use this method only if you have repeatable records or processes, meaning you're setting them up once and then you're working on them for months or years. That's when it'll be worth the setup journey. But if you're using records for high volume, high frequency activity where you're creating a new record for every order and you have a hundred of them a day, I don't think this link record is going to be your best friend because setting that manual step up or using automations for each time you need to do that feels like a little bit too much administration for a high volume process. Okay, speaking of volume, let's go to option number three which is a help text. So this is just taking any field that you normally have and this works really well if you choose the field per phase option and with that field using the field settings, you're going to add help text that mentions the sop. And when someone sees this help text which appears anytime they hover over the record, they know ah, that's where I go for more information. This method is really nice because it's not cluttering up your interface at all and it makes folks reminded of the SOP every time they happen to hover over it. Because this is easy to miss, not a clickable link, and just kind of subtle. I would say this is going to be the best option for processes where the reference information or the SOP is optional or nice to have. That brings us to option number four. Option number four is to use a Smart Doc field, a field type that's called a Smart Doc. Pretty easy to have. And in the Smart Docs add formatting text and add hyperlinks to your SOPs. Okay, so it's very similar to the first one we would go over here. We'd grab the link from the URL bar or from the menu here and we can add that hyperlink to words or to call outs or to other existing formatting inside that smart document. I love this option because it is very aesthetic. You can really spell out why someone should click the link, it looks pretty, it looks clear, and it allows you to once again use those default values I love so much. And you could have all of this stuff baked in to your default value whenever you create a new record, making this very easy to repeat for processes where you have higher volume. The downside of this method in my view, is that you have to have a smart doc in order to do it. You can do this in a general text field, but it's just not as pretty. And smart docs are pretty large, they take up a lot of vertical space. So if you don't want that, it could be a downside. It's also easy to forget this. Imagine I had this SOP here and I accidentally deleted it and we ended up with this. It could be very easy for me to just not ever put an SOP here because I'm not thinking of it. I don't have a big old field yelling at me to add it, so it's easy to miss. Additionally, because this is all baked into a smart doc field, we can't necessarily report on it, particularly if that doc is used for multiple things. It's not like we could report on how many of these are filled in or filled out because it's all just blended together into one smart doc field. Despite all those downsides though, because this is such an approachable option, I would actually say for beginners this would be the method I would start using if you wanted to start connecting SOPs to records in SmartSuite. I know it's a little bit weird, but this is probably where I would go as my first go to option for a beginner. Finally though, the last option we have for adding SOPs in SmartSuite looks something like this. It's a checklist where you have thing you need to do and baked right into that checklist. Just using text as formatting, using a bar and SOP and that pasting the link to our sop. This is our final option for going about things. What I love about this is it allows it to be right where work is happening. The SOP is right there, you can't miss it. But as you can see, it's not the prettiest. And when you have multiple SOPs, it's definitely not a very appealing presence to have. But that is our final option when it comes to organizing our SOPs and connecting them to records in SmartSuite. This would be one I would do for any one off process. However, checklists can work as we've talked about before with those default field values which could allow you to connect these together really well. So if you had a highest volume process, this may actually be a really nice way to make sure that the SOPs cannot be missed, and particularly if each piece is assigned to a different person. You know, if I'm in here and I'm the assignee for this given piece, I'm going to see that SOP and there is no excuses. I'm not going to accidentally check the box and not notice the call out at the top. It's right there with my work. So for higher volume processes, this actually might be the better way to go for your particular workflow. So once again, if you need to reference that chart I showed on the screen, check out the area below where we have it linked in the blog. But you can use that then to create these connections for each step step or each phase, depending on how detailed you want to be of your workflow. The result is that your process that was just in your brain or on your whiteboard or in your notepad. This stuff becomes part of your SmartSuite ecosystem when you create either these fields or these kind of phases we talked about earlier on, your process is now a part of the software and ready for you to use it. Every time that process comes up, all you need to do is go through these five steps, choose your preferred options on step three and five, where there are some options available to you there, and then bring it to life. Then repeat this process. For the next process you want to bake into your SmartSuite account using a new template, a new structure, or your next level of this existing process. Of course, to do all of that you need to make sure you have your SmartSuite account set up. So if you haven't already, use our affiliate link in the description below to get started with SmartSuite. If you contact support and tell them we sent you, they'll also give you a little extra bonus. Also, if you need a little bit of help on the SOP side or just need some help getting started in general, check out the description below where we have that free SOP template for SmartSuite as well as info about our SmartSuite services. Thanks so much guys for watching this video about getting your process into SmartSuite. SmartSuite. Thank you for letting us do this video. This was so fun and super geeky. And for those of you who are watching this video who need a little accountability to make sure you take action on this, I'd love for you to write in the comments below what what process you are going to be baking into SmartSuite next. Thanks so much for watching, guys. And until next time, enjoy the process.