How to Turn SOPs into Templates for Task Management

For teams that do write down standard operating procedures, how they do things in their business, they think they're doing the right thing by keeping those sops somewhere safe. They put the sops in a policy binder, on a bookshelf or in some kind of 16th chapel of systemization, so no one can touch the sops. God forbid they mess them up. Now, I understand the heart behind these decisions, right? Standard operating procedures, the recipes for how you do things in your business, they are important, they do deserve protection. But when we make them so far removed from the worker, so far removed from our day to day life, it makes it very hard to actually use those SOPs. And if we don't use the recipes for how to operate things properly in our business, well, then there's a good chance we won't operate things properly in our business, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of SOP writing to begin with. When teams practice this kind of protectiveness around their SOPs, it doesn't make much sense. It's almost, almost as if you were in the Great British Bake off and you had to bake a cake in the technical challenge. And rather than just giving everybody the recipe and having it at their workstation so they could start cooking, the hosts for some reason just took the recipe for the technical challenge and taped it to the outside of the big white tent everyone is cooking in. So if anyone wanted to reference the recipe they're supposed to use, they have to go run to the outside of the tent, read the recipe, and then run back in to keep baking. I would bet in this circumstance, a lot more of our bakers would be operating off of memory if they had to run all the way outside just to see the recipe. They just try to memorize it and do the best they could. And that's for something like the Great British Bake Off. I don't know about you guys, but when it comes to my staff and myself, I'm not exactly bringing, you know, bread week in the white tent energy to my work every single week. I can be a little lazy at times. So for my benefit and the benefit of my colleagues, it makes more sense for me to put my SOPs somewhere convenient. And that brings me to the topic of today's video. We're going to be taking an SOP and connecting it into a task template we're going to build out directly in our tool of choice. Whether you use something like SmartSuite or ClickUp or asana or notion or trello or anything else to manage your tasks, this strategy will work regardless of platform and allow you to make your SOPs way more convenient so your bakers don't have to run to the outside of the tent. Now, step one of this process is pretty obvious. You'll need an sop, a standard operating procedure. That means we need to have some kind of recipe before we can turn it into some kind of task template. Odds are if you're watching this video, you already have SOPs such as the one I'm showing here on the screen inside your business. If you don't, though, I would suggest you watch this video up here where I go over some strategies for writing SOPs in a lightweight and easy to use way. It doesn't matter whether your SOPs are housed inside your work management software like this, or inside some kind of word tool or inside some kind of dedicated process documentation software like Trainual or Process Street. What matters is that you have this sop, this recipe define for your business. Ooh, quick reminder here. If you're not sure what an SOP is or how your SOPs should be formatted when it comes to creating these kinds of recipes, maybe you just want to steal the example I have up on the screen. Check out the description area below where we have 109 SOP example topics as well as some suggested formatting that you can steal and use in your own business. Again, free in the description below. Once you've got that, we're ready for step two and in this case what we want to do is look at our SOP and figure out where we need tasks to happen. In most cases you will have tasks for either the title of the sop. For this case, creating Google Drive folders is probably the task I need to create and or the step names. For example, maybe I want a specific task just for duplicating a file. The decision between whether you want to create tasks for just the overall container or for each little step depends on the process you are doing. In general, I like to make tasks that that equal to one work session for one person. Because of that, even a task like creating Google Drive folders may look different in my ClickUp account depending on the type of team I have supporting this process. For example, if I had one person who was going to create Google Drive folders all in one sitting, then I would have this as one task right here and that would be the template I'm going to create. If, however, my process is more complicated and I have multiple people involved, I might break things apart even further. I could have my task for the overall SOP topic. But then I could have subtasks for each major step involved. How detailed you get here will depend on the process and the team that you're working in. Let's just do another example beyond Google Drive folders. Let's pretend we are baking. If I am at home and I need to bake a loaf of bread for me, I will create one task in my work management tool to say, hey Layla, bake some bread. But let's imagine I had bread that needed to be done over multiple sittings. I was working on a sourdough, so I need to have the starter and then let it sit it or whatever the heck. In that case, I would create two tasks for myself because I want to have one task per person per work session. In this case, I would need one task for me to prep the dough and one task for me the following day to actually bake the bread. Now let's push the example even further. Let's imagine there were multiple people involved in helping me with my sourdough. In that case, I would have many different tasks. I'd have one task for the person in charge of the starter, one task for the person in charge of prepping it, one person in charge of proofing, one person in charge of blah blah blah blah. I want one task per step per work session per person. A work session is typically anywhere from 20 to 90 minutes, depending on someone's attention span, and I want to make sure all of my tasks are approximately that size or smaller. Step two is just identifying which steps of your SOP need to have tasks inside your task management system. Once you've got that down, step three is creating them. For example, if I've decided that I'm going to have a whole team of people work together on Google Drive folder creation, I'm going to create a series of sub steps. Or maybe if I decide I want to have one person do all of the Google Drive folder creation, I might just add one checklist item and assign it to the relevant person. In SmartSuite, the tool you use doesn't really matter here. What matters is that you create the appropriate number of tasks based on how zoomed in or zoomed out you want to be. Once you've got step three down, we are ready for step four, which is adding a connection of some kind to your sop. This is the magic stuff that ensures your team doesn't have to go hunting and pecking for your sop. It's right there where they need it. In the case of SmartSuite, right here I've added the link to the SOP by adding formatting directly into my Checklist field, which is a relatively new feature in SmartSuite and a huge time saver in the case of ClickUp. I've actually added descriptions to some of these subtasks to tell them exactly where to find the SOP that includes the relevant Instructions. Whether using SmartSuite or ClickUp or any other tool that is your goal for this step. Add a hyperlink, Add a relationship, Add a connection of some kind that connects your task to the sop, whether that's at the step level or or the overview level. Ooh, and a quick side note here, A common question I will get at this point is Layla, why am I linking to the sop? I want it to be super convenient, right? So why wouldn't I just write the SOP right here? Well, here's the problem. Unlike you know, your grandmother's recipe for pancakes, when it comes to SOPs, things frequently change. If I was to take my SOP right here and copy and paste this whole thing into every single task, every single time, what would happen when my process changed? Well, in this example, I'd be creating these Google Drive folders for every new video, which at the time of recording is what, like 320 we've done here on the channel? Be sure to subscribe to see the next one, but what that means is I would have 320 different versions of this Create Google Drive Folders task for each of the 320 videos. So if my process changes, I would need to go into every single task and update that SOP so no one's confused when they're going to do their next task. To me, that headache is not worth it. So that's why I recommend folks use the hyperlink method instead. Yes, it's not as convenient as seeing it right there, but as long as people are working on a computer where they can have two tabs open, it's not that much worse. And the benefits of not having to do a bunch of manual data entry for me more than outweigh that little bit of extra friction we're introducing into accessing the sop. That kind of headache of a versioning issue is something you'll experience in just about every task management tool. If you're using some kind of process dedicated software that has worked around this versioning issue, such as Process street, you can ignore this advice, but for the vast majority of us, stick with that hyperlink or mentioning option to make sure you're not making your lives harder in the future. All right, Once you have that SOP linked and you've got everything in there now, we need to actually save our work to turn this thing into a template. The way you're going to template your task is going to differ depending on the tool you use. In the case of a tool like Asana, you might actually just create a given project with all of the steps included and. And the next time you're going to do that task, you're going to duplicate what you've created by just copying the task. In the case of a tool like ClickUp, you might actually go into the Template center and save your work as a template and then reuse that every time a new task is due. For one more example, if you're using a tool like SmartSuite, you might actually go in and modify the fields to add default values that outline each of the steps you want to remember. So that way it's always there each time a new task is created. Whether you duplicate, Template, Automate, or use some kind of fancy feature like what SmartSuite has here, you can. Your goal is that the next time you need to do this given activity that the SOP is for, as soon as someone creates that task, the SOP is automatically there. They don't have to hunt for it, they don't have to wait in line for it, they don't have to run outside the tent for it. That SOP is right in their face and just one click away. By making the SOP easier to access, with less friction involved in viewing it, you're increasing the likelihood that people will actually check this SOP, update this SOP and ultimately give you the benefits of those SOPs, which are, in case you need a refresher, improving the consistency and quality of all that it is your business is trying to do. Doing things excellently, consistently sounds like a great kind of practice for me, which is why I practice this exact same SOP strategy I'm describing to you here inside my business here at ProcessDriven. Now, if you're watching this video and you're getting inspired, but you're starting to think, wait a second, sops, I've not quite created that many of those. I've got a little bonus resource for you in the description below that's totally free. It's A list of 109 topics, types of SOPs you might want to create. It covers topics like how to send an invoice and how to handle a refund, and common situations that just about every business should have an SOP for you can find that complete list of SOPs to help inspire which ones you need to create next inside that resource. We also have some suggested formatting for designing your SOPs, so be sure to check it out again free in the description below. However, if you're just SOP curious and not ready to start diving in with that free resource, you can watch this video next. This playlist will show you a little bit more about how to get started with sops. Will be helpful beginner guide for whenever you're ready to start actually creating these for your business. I'll see you in the next video. And until next time, enjoy the process.