How to Write an SOP Efficiently for Your Small Team

FOREIGN hello and welcome Early Birds to our how to Write SOPS live stream. If you can see in here, okay, just let me know, Leave me a message in the chat and while you're at it, let me know where you're joining us from. What country are you in? What are you doing today? How are you making the time for this? I appreciate you being here and we'll be starting right on time on the hour for now, here's some music as a reminder, we're going to be getting started here on the hour. If you can see in here. Okay, just let me know in the chat and let me know where we are coming from, where you're joining us from today. And we'll be getting started very shortly. We'll be getting started shortly, but while we are getting these final pieces in order, I see some hellos pop again. So let's get them up on the screen and say some welcome to our friends from around the world and around the country here in the US SA Foreign hello, hello and welcome. Slash welcome back to our livestream here on the channel. We are going to be getting started with our walkthrough of how to create an sop. Now, as I go through this, we're going to be trying some new stuff with some background music here on a live stream. So I'm hoping you can help me out, make sure these balances work. If you have any difficulty hearing or if it is Echo City, as I saw something in the chat here and that's about us, let me know so we can make sure that this is the best experience possible Today. What we're going to be going through is a live example of how to write an sop. Now bear with me because this probably isn't the most entertaining video to watch, but what I want to show you is exactly how I write sops in real time. You can fast forward it if you want through certain parts on the replay. But I want to show you what this looks like because the common objection I hear when it comes to writing standard operating procedures, those instructions for your business is the fact that when you create those instructions, you have to spend time doing them. And the fear of how long that might take or how complicated that could be often keeps people from writing them at all. And then all of a sudden we're running our businesses or our teams out of our memories, which is not the goal. So today I'm going to demonstrate exactly how I would write an sop. And because I'm all about the efficiency here, I'm, I'm actually going to be writing an sop. I have to write today, so you're going to help me get some of my task list done because I actually have this on my to do list and Monica's been waiting patiently. So now it's time to just get this work done to get us started. And before we dive into our very first SOP live creation here, I want to just make sure we're all on the same page. As to the steps of writing an sop, let me zoom out just a little bit so that way you can get my face out of there, but maybe a little bit more because my eyes aren't that good either. Let's just go back in. Let's talk briefly about the steps of writing an sop. These steps go through these phases that I'm going to show on the screen and anyone who is in our process driven membership, that foundations approach, you've probably already heard us talk about this because we go into this in detail in our program and in the new version of the program coming out this, this coming quarter here, we're going to be going into this in a lot more detail. But the basic steps for anyone are as follows. When you are getting started, you want to figure out what the heck the process is that you want to be systemizing or in this case, you want to be equipping with a standard operating procedure or recipe. What is it? If you don't know what you are writing an SOP for, odds are it's not the right time to write those SOPs because all these guys are these SOPs up here is a form of equipment, a way of making a thing you need to do better. If you don't know what that thing you need to do is, well, not going to make a whole lot of sense for us to write instructions for how to do something. We're not quite sure what we've got going on. So that is our first step. For most people, when you're writing an sop, this is kind of a given. You know your steps pretty well because you are already here thinking, I know what I need to do, I need to write an SOP for it. Which is why I have this kind of grayed out for today. We're not going to do this process mapping step because I'm going to be operating off of the assumption, as would be the case for most of you here, that I roughly know what I'm going to be writing instructions for. But if you're in the earlier stages of business, you probably do want to Include this. Beyond that, we have three additional phases. Let me try to center this on the screen the best I can. We have this kind of iterative approach to SOPs here at ProcessDriven that go into three chunks that kind of repeat and repeat and repeat. The first chunk we have here is chunk one. I don't know, we need a sexier name for it. But this is when we're going to write a few key pieces of our SOP structure. The first piece is the purpose. The purpose is the reason that that SOP or that thing that you're doing matters. The purpose is where we identify our overall goal. For example, if we have an SOP for how to write an invoice in our purpose section, we might explain why is an invoice important? Why does getting this right matter? And so on. That's purpose. Below that we have Start, Stop, and Steps. Now, you guys are probably familiar with this from our other YouTube video where we talk about the pieces of an SOP template. If you do not have an SOP template and this feels like a foreign concept, Carly can probably grab from the, from our interwebs somewhere we can grab the link and share that SOP framework for you. So you can just steal that template. But our key pieces here are the beginning of the process, the end of the process, and the key mini results in between. You're going to see me demonstrate this in practice, but this is also going to be your first step. Overall, our goal is that this first step only take us about five to 20 minutes. Okay, five to 20. And then we are done. Ideally in the real world. When we are done and we're ready to move on, we wait days, if not weeks, if not months, to come back to this process. Because when we come back, we want to look with fresh eyes to review that existing information. We want to add a little bit more context that we want to add in and again spend another five to 20 minutes of effort refining this SOP with a fresh perspective, or preferably with a new person coming in with fresh eyes that are completely new to the process. Our third step in this flow is to review existing information, add additional details and add some FAQs. These again are additional pieces of our SOP template that we're going to be creating together. But this is our third visit, just like the last one. Ideally, in a real world scenario, with all of these steps that we have in place, we would be doing each of these in a separate sitting after a substantial break in between. So you do it one day, maybe you'd Wait a week, come back and do it again. Wait a week, come back and do it again. Finally, when you are done with all of those steps, we are ready for what I think is the fun part as a, you know, in that CEO perspective, which is actually quantifying this progress by connecting our SOP to our scoreboard of systemization, our foundation of processes. If you're not familiar with this concept, this is the ability for you to report on how many SOPs you have, what processes they connect to, and the overall strength and systemization of your business. Now, this is probably a conversation for a whole other video. And if you want to learn more about this kind of scoreboard stuff, you can check out the blueprint webinar that we can drop a link for in the chat or we'll have in the description for the replay. That is, in a nutshell, our big picture. But you didn't come here for the big picture, right? Today we're going to actually practice this. So I think it's time I get to work to actually start writing our sop. And we want to have our process in place. We needed to pick a topic and like I said from the beginning, I actually have some homework I'm supposed to be doing today. So let's just do my homework. And today we're actually going to create the process of how to proof work. And we're going to actually make this specifically for process driven because I have some templates actually for SmartSuite and ClickUp that we are releasing shortly. We're doing a lot of content production around templates, and given that I have the obligation right now to kind of establish a really good proofing process and I want to show you how I'm going to turn that into an sop. This is a process that is fairly new and to date, I've only ever done just kind of by my gut, just by looking for things I know to look for. And so this will be my first and candid attempt at trying to systemize this. If you are someone that doesn't produce templates, please still view this as a relevant example because I'm sure everyone in every business has to proof things from time to time. And I hope the way that we're going to be systemizing this might help you in your own sops for proofing. So I guess let's dive in. Darn, now I got to do the work. We'll come back to this at the end and share some pro tips. Carly will make sure I don't forget to come back to this page, but we're going to head into our SOP template and actually start the work. Before I do, is there any questions here in the chat? Let me just do a quick check here. Any panic? Excited to learn. Yay, Alison. I'm happy to hear that, Jennifer. Will there be a replay? Absolutely. Allison has been very overwhelming. I get that it's a lot at first, but it looks like. Okay, looks like we're in a good spot. So let's get started here. I am here in a Google Doc. The reason I'm doing a Google Doc is because I feel like this is the least overwhelming document writing tool that just about everybody has access to. And whatever tool you are using, whether it's a Google Doc SmartSuite ClickUp Monday notion, your overall process for writing these SOPs will be the same. So let's go back here and let's see where do I want to start? I know what my process already is. I've already identified that below. So I'm going to do the phase one step of purpose, start, stop and steps. I'm going to fill out these areas. So purpose. Here we go. My start, stop and steps is all the procedure area and this is going to be my focus for this first work session. I've got five to 20 minutes to do this, but because we're on air, I guess I got to get closer to the five. We're going to get some music playing in the background here and let's get to work. I'm just going to start writing this, I guess. Okay, Purpose. So I'm talking about right here. I want to get the name of this process over here. Okay, thank you. My title in here, how to Proof Review templates. Purpose. What is the purpose of reviewing these? I don't need to talk about what is the purpose of templates in this case, just what's the purpose of proofing them. Templates can be the most exciting but also most daunting stuff of any work. Any work management software. To avoid overwhelming our students and members, it's important that we connect them with. That's not how you spell with. With only the highest quality templates that truly solve a workflow or process centric pain point that will save them time, energy and stress. To do this, we need to be meticulous about our template quality. And that all starts with proofing. There we go. I'm pretty happy with that as a purpose. This is probably a little longer than I would do for some pieces, but I'm going to zoom in a little Bit more. Sorry, guys. That's probably small in the eyes. Would I proofread this if I was actually doing it? In all? Honestly, no. I would probably just leave it as is. People can figure out my intent and this kind of lets people set the stage as to what they're doing going for here. All right, the next piece I need to do is Start, Stop and Steps. I'm going to write that here as a reminder. All that is is the procedure section where we're going to get things started off. Abby, we should do a clip for this for us to co work. You know what, you can thank Streamyard for this. Actually Streamyard is what we're using today and they provided this music that we wanted to play with, so. Thanks Streamyard. It's really. It's really nice. All right, start. What we want to do here is figure out what the start of our process is. In this case we're have a open up the Ready to Proof template located in our resource publishing database. I would probably put a link here, but in this case I'm going to keep it very simple and just have that as my start. And now my stop. So my stop would be all corrections, concerns and edits are shared with the template. The person responsible for template revisions. This one's really important, particularly for this use case because we've had issues in the past at ProcessDriven, specifically where we have like a review task and it's unclear whether that person reviewing the work also needs to make the revisions or just identify what needs to be fixed. The difference between reviewing, meaning I'm going to look at things and find issues and revising, meaning I'm doing the reviewing and I'm also fixing it, is something that has been messy for us in the past in the earlier days. And so we really try to clarify this and why this particular piece is really important. See a quick question from Mal here. Why did you use Whimsical instead of ClickUp whiteboards? You can learn a little bit more about my position on ClickUp Whiteboards in the video we have on the channel. It's from when it first released. But a lot of my concerns are the same same simply because ClickUp whiteboards are a little clunky and I'm a bit of a snob around, you know, usability. I like things to be really easy to use and I really like how Whimsical is quick to use, especially in live streams. If you can't tell, I'm doing a little bit of multitasking. So the easier the Tool is to snap to grid and so on. Makes my life a lot easier. All right, so that is our start and our stop. We've identified the first and the last step. Now I need a put the stuff in between. So here's where it gets a little tricky. This is a process that I've never systemized and I've always just done it by, you know, being Layla, looking at it, being like, oh, this is off. So I need to kind of reflect on this. I think this is pretty common for processes where it's knowledge work happening. So here's what I would do and here's what I would encourage anyone else here to do as well. We need to go through and actually experience the process either through our mind's eye, kind of like an event planner, or by actually doing the work in real time with the sop. So let's go through here. I'm going to head into SmartSuite and ClickUp because in this case this is a real world process I have to do. What I'm working on here are templates that are in both platforms and I want to maintain consistency between them and quality on both. I hear that there's a little bit of an issue keeping the. Having the music and following along. So I'm going to dip the volume down on that music a little bit there to see if that helps you, Johan. So anyway, let's go in here. Okay. To get back to. I need to figure out the steps I do to make a revision and I've never considered it. So what I'm going to do is actually go in and pretend I'm doing the task and see what I check for. That's what's going to allow me to kind of define my reviewing steps by. By experiencing and observing what I actually do. So let's start off with this ClickUp template right here. We've got one for announcements. If I needed to review this, where would I start? My gut instinct is to tell me to actually check the fields first. Yeah, I think that's where I'm going to start. So what I'm going to do is check the fields located at each location and see if they make sense, if the dropdown values make sense, if they're at the right spot, and so on. So I'm going to check the custom fields using the new custom field manager. Here's a little preview for any ClickUp geeks that are out there. Check here. Not seeing any fields on this? That cannot be right, can it? Is this a no field template? It might Be. Let's go inside this one, this imaginary situation. Okay, so there are some fields. ClickUp's just a little buggy. No problem. All right, we've got a type field. Let me check the other list to see if there's any fields on this one list. Settings, Custom fields still doesn't work properly. Let's go over to this one. Hey, this is why new features are always fun. They keep us on our toes. Custom field manager is here. It's exciting, but not quite working yet. All right, so we have the source, we have the topics, and we have attachments. Okay. So I feel pretty good in saying that that would be my first step in reviewing this. So I'm going to say review fields, fields, custom fields, and track errors or issues. At some point I am going to need to define where to track these errors or issues, but I'm going to handle that as a phase two. What other steps would I do? Okay, once I actually review these fields, I'd probably go into standard fields as well. So custom fields are just these extra columns. But there's a lot of fields that are there by default that, that are like forced to be there that I would want to check. So this includes things like statuses, maybe what Click apps are available. Let me add that as my next step. Review standard fields, click apps. As I'm writing this, I'm realizing, especially for the types of templates we're doing, I may need to customize these steps based on whether we're Talking about a SmartSuite template or a ClickUp template or a notion template Google Doc template. So I may need to maybe to make this list a little different for each one. But that's okay. We're going to keep this for now. All right. Once we are checking the data structure, which is essentially what this step was, I think it's time for us to look at the actual organization of the pieces. So I guess at this point I'm going to look at the vertical and horizontal hierarchy, just basically the data architecture. So review vertical and horizontal hierarchy. Cool. I'm saying that's pretty good. So what would I look at after that? Views, our fields. Anything else? I guess I would probably check for any other kind of settings that are nested in the hierarchy. Automations, for example, I would want to check these over. So let me go back into my SOP and I'm going to add Review automations. Notice right now I'm not being picky about order of operations. I'm just going with what I think I would do by Observing myself doing it and trying not to get in my own weight too much if I can. Let's see views. Got that? I guess I would all fit under that kind of hierarchy here. I'll just make sure I clarify that here. Use settings, etc. Vertical is very clear. Review automations. Is there anything else I would want to check for here? Oh, there we go. Some descriptive data review built in instructions and descriptions. So in this case I might be looking at things like the list information or the solution guide. Am I able to move my. No, I'm so sorry. Yes, absolutely I can. Anecdote. Let me get my big old hit out of the way. But first let me check the chat here. I got a question here from Cody. Hey Cody, should you make a task for making an SOP and any notes on the process will be noted in the comments? Yeah, that's typically. I think that's a nice way to go about it. If you have. You're like hey, on Friday I want to write this SOP for this thing, create a task, right? And that would give you that workshop area and when you're done you would paste this into your overall SOP directory. I think it's a great way to track your time on that. And yes, I will definitely move it and yell at me if I don't. Okay. Alright, head gone. There you go. Back into this. I want to see if there's any other steps I might be missing if I were to go in here and check everything over. I think those are the main things I checked, names of fields and so on. I think that's the main stuff. I'm going to now flip over to SmartSuite which is a similar setup. But I want to just see if there's anything that I would be checking in SmartSuite that I would not have captured in this list right here. So fields, custom fields. Yes, I would definitely check that first. I would check views. I have that already defined here in my third step. Standard fields aren't really relevant to SmartSuite. So if I'm determined to make one SOP for all situations here, I may need to refine these a little bit. So let's just do fields of all kinds, standard plus custom fields. And this one I'm just going to do settings and click apps because I think that's a better way to capture the fact that we're talking about overall things. All right, so those are my pieces here. For each of these I'm going to make sure I have a reminder to track the issues because I do not want to forget that piece of actually writing down what I find and I need to work on my capitalization. But for now I'm happy with that. Check this one over anything else with SmartSuites particularly that I want to check over Permissions don't need to worry about because when we're copying those over folks will have that as part of our instructions. Automations I already have included Solution API does not impact us and Solution Guide, this is blank so hey look, something I'll have to fix but I already have that captured on built in instructions so I might just clarify list description field descriptions for Solution Guide. All this stuff I'm going to end up breaking down in more detail when we get down to later phases. But for now, I mean I think those are kind of the main steps I look for. And this is for the template itself. When we get to proofing the resource the way that people install it inside the program, there's more steps we're going to want to check for, but this is just going to be the resource. So I think that's a good, good piece. So let's go back. I'm going to put my big head back on the screen, but I think it'll be okay. Let me know if not that right there. I wish I had a timer. Maybe Carly can tell us in the chat how long did that one take? Anyone? Anyone good with time might be able to remember. We can check that on the replay later on. But our goal for that first phase of what I just did of purpose, start, stop and steps is five to 20 minutes. Now I was rambling a little bit and multitasking so it's possible I might have gone a little bit over. But I think judging at the time we are in this live stream so far I think we're about good. Ideally we are going to now stop. We're going to put this SOP in our area kind of like Cody was hinting at. We'll put it over there and we will revisit this SOP in a week, a few days or we'll have somebody else do the next step. Because if I just go right into it, I'm not going to have as fresh of a perspective as if I waited and came back to it later. Let me get the question in the chat right quick here. Stephanie's asking, once the SOP is created and then linked within the task or task template, or would the person needing guidance search the SOP database? Good question. So once we create these SOPs in whatever tool you're using the way you connect them is going to differ from tool to tool. We have a video on both major platforms we support here. So we have one on SmartSuite and we have one on ClickUp on how to connect your SOPs to your tasks. There are several methods per framework, but generally speaking, yes, you would want to connect them. So your first suggestion there, Stephanie, of having them linked somehow, maybe just dropping a hyperlink or using a linked record, that's what you want to aim for just because it's easier. Yes, it's nice for people to know that they can go into that SOPS area and just search for it. But if we can, we want to reduce friction. We want to make it so easy for people to reference these instructions that for me, if this was my SOP in Google Docs, I would take this overall link. Oops, sorry, head in the way. I would take this overall link and I would put this inside the task I signed out. So if I assigned, you know, Carly to go proof a template, I would say, hey, go proof this template. Here is the link to the sop. I try to make it very, very easy. So that's how we go about it now, as I said, ideally we would be waiting a week plus or reassigning this to a new person, but I'm insane. So let's just go ahead and not practice what we preach here and demonstrate the next phase just for the sake of instruction. Understanding this would be a lot higher quality if we waited a bit. All right, so over here, our next phase is to review the existing information and add the inputs and the outputs. So let's just go for. Back here we've got inputs and outputs. Can you imagine what we're working on today? Yeah, inputs and outputs. So this is the. So these are the next pieces of our template. We want to fill in for inputs. All we're focused on here is what stuff, what ingredients do you need to be able to actually start this procedure? What are the pieces in this case? You know, we're not going to count, like knowledge of ClickUp or anything like that, but we are going to need a ready to proof template installation link. So we need to have a template that is at the point of review where people are like, yeah, I want someone else to review this. So we're going to need that install link of some kind. We are going to need access to the software that that template is in. So in this case it could be ClickUp, SmartSuite, Monday Notion, whatever, Admin access to relevant work management Software. If we were going to create this per work management software, we would say click up here, we'd say SmartSuite here. But since this is going to be our catch all, then we won't worry about it. We want admin access because some of these templates do require that extra power. Anything else we need? You know what actually would be a good one? Process driven brand voice guide. Some of this stuff is going to require us to be mindful of our capitalization and spelling and I think having that handy would be very helpful. But I don't think there's any other inputs. We need this and the SOP and we should be good to go. Awesome. I do think we probably want to leave it as a separate thing. All right, outputs. Now, how do we know when we're done? What's the final thing look like? List of prioritized edits delivered in a checklist through our work management platform assigned to the template revisor. I don't know. We'll need a more clear term for what that person is, but we basically want to make sure that we have all of the edits given to that person assigned out to the person charged with revisions. When you have that, then you are done. So let me just. I'm going to say assigned comment because we're just going to say we're going to send these via ClickUp. We'll be more specific because we do want all of our edits to go in the same spot. List of all prioritize edits. Perfect. So that's how you know you're done. We might add a screenshot here to clarify what that looks like, but honestly I think this is about good. Assigned comment is going to be fine for now. We may want to expand this into a task list in the future, but because of how our structure is set up, that's going to be just fine. The next piece we want to have at this point is to review existing information. If you haven't gathered, this is a pretty quick step. So inputs, outputs. Already got that down. The next thing I would do is read through all of this and see if it makes sense. Now if I was doing this with fresh eyes, it might be more helpful. But I'm just going to look through what I have now. A few things are jumping out to me just in the sense that I would like to reorganize some of these. So that way I'm talking structure and settings before I go into more detail. I basically want to go big picture to small picture and I feel like this Revised order helps me get that. So I'm going to keep that as. So yeah, I'm going to change this to a verb with the person responsible. Perfect. Every line starts with a verb. Every line tells me kind of what I should have accomplished by the end. You know, that's pretty decent, pretty decent for doing it live here. So I'm just going to keep that as is. And now we're ready to move on to the next session. I would guesstimate that that round took closer to the five minute mark. I'm hoping, I don't know, didn't do. See, we should have like a little stopwatch timer on here or something. But that's about where we're at on this one. And this would be considered our second pass through. Just like that, we've got an SOP going from draft to evolved draft and we would want to wait again another period or have a new fresh set of eyes come in to do this final piece and our final check. So let's go through this one. What is this one all about? Our final check is to review the existing information again and then start to add details. This is one that can be very time consuming, but this is also one that repeats endlessly. So if I just go in here and add a little repeat symbol for our memory, we would want to keep repeating this step forever. Every time we look at this process, every time we have a new idea, we would be repeating this step step of the process of adding additional context. So let's go in and do that again. We wouldn't want to be doing this in this order in real life. We'd want to be done by now. But in the efforts of showing you the full flow, let's go through. So review existing information. Reviewed it. Fine, we'll skip that. Details and media. What this is referring to is how to accomplish each mini result. So each of these steps, if I've done my job correctly, which I did it pretty quickly, but hey, it gets the job done, I want to define how do you accomplish that outcome. So in this case, how do I review settings and click Apps and track errors or issues? I really want to break down how exactly that happens. And that's what happens inside the section itself. If you're using a tool like SmartSuite or ClickUp here, using a toggle so you can close and open the section makes your SOP so much more digestible. But if you're using Word or Google Docs like this, here's where we want to go. So in here, review settings and click Apps to track issues and errors. What I want to do in here is start to make some kind of reference list of what exactly I am reviewing. So this is where I might want to break things up by platform just because I know there are differences that start to come up and I'm going to just review everything I possibly look at. Trying to observe myself once again because this can take a little bit longer. I might find myself just doing one step in 20 minutes. I might find myself just adding a little context to one piece and the next time adding it to another piece and so on. So very, very simple and lightweight. So what settings am I going to review on the ClickUp side of things? I'm going to be looking at click Apps. So that put that there. We will add a checklist inside. Oops. Google Docs. I do prefer using our work management software for this stuff. It's just so much nicer. But we will just keep moving. Cool. So I'm going to look at Qlik apps. I'm going to look at space settings. Anything that's being inherited I'm going to look at. We're not going to count statuses or so on here. Ah, in fields. We'll count that down here again. I'm going to kind of break this down as I'm thinking of things in my mind's eye. I'm just going to be adding them here and this is kind of how it goes. I'm thinking of things as I go. I don't. As if you haven't gathered, this is not a scripted. A scripted checklist here. I haven't done this before in this way. So let's see. Review fields, typos, capitalization, pinned, not pinned. What else would I be checking for? Make sense? Necessary Build type. If I wanted to make my life a little bit easier or make the user's life a little easier, I could phrase these as questions to make them more of a savvy checklist. Does the field type best fit the data? Are all fields necessary? You know what I mean. If I broke these out by a question, it would be easier for someone to check them off. If no create your note revision. I would just do this for each one of these. Are all fields necessary? Important. Pinned, not pins. I would just keep going. I know we're coming up at the end and this is reasonable because we should be spending about 20 minutes per round or less on this and We've only got 30 minutes for this whole livestream. So it's pretty quick. And I would just keep Keep breaking this out. In this case, I don't think I need to break this out by software. Check for the following and note revisions if criteria are not met. And I would just keep breaking this down as specific as I can and so on. And I would do this for every single one. Now I see there's some questions in the chat and we are wrapping up. We are at the end here, so let me just pull these in. Stephanie asks, you've previously spoken about empowering team members to update SOPs themselves. Yeah. So Stephanie, as soon as I create this, my ownership of this SOP ends. SOPs do not have owners. In, in our view at least there may be someone who's ultimately responsible for the quality of them. But every single person on your team is responsible for making them better. When I go through these first steps, so let's just say get my face out of the way. Purpose and existing information. I probably am going to have people who have done this process involved. Like for example, in this exact case, I'm going to do this step and I'm going to pull in Monica and I'll say, hey Monica, can you help me out and do the second step? Just review this information. And when Monica's done, I'm probably going to go back and do this one. And then the next time Monica is going to do this one and then maybe, you know, Sam will do this one. And that's kind of how the revision works. This review happens endlessly. Every time the process is used, people will open it up and they'll be like, hey, this doesn't make sense. Or any time we catch an error, perhaps a template got approved and you know, someone sees it and they're like, oh, that feels ugly. Why did we use that? We would then add that back into the SOP to check for next time. So in terms of how does that happen? Everybody just adds pieces as they see an issue, but the owner is the person responsible for just soliciting that feedback. I'm trying to move away from user specific manuals to more process driven manuals. I love that. That's awesome. I'm glad to hear. This way, if part of the process changes, others are aware and give input into how they're part of the process now needs to change. That is so great. If you are someone that is tracking your SOPs directly inside your work management software, adding people as followers or subscribers or watchers to that SOP is a great way to keep keep people informed. Have you set up ClickUp for tax planning and CPA firms Oh my goodness, so many. Alison we have a lot of folks that are in the financial industry inside our ProcessDriven Foundations program. There are some quirks to that industry that make particularly SOPs more challenging because you're so involved with your clients that you have some tweaks to your process on a per client basis. But there are ways to address that by kind of having some client specific reference documentation. Abby says this is done on a schedule. Right? Because the team knows the sop. They don't regularly open up the SOP every time. Correct. So this will be done anytime the SOP is referenced and looked at. Often that'll be when someone is doing the process and they haven't done it in a while, or when somebody new takes over the process or when someone does a task that they just really want to make sure we get right. So for example, recording YouTube videos, you think I know how to do that by now. But I actually do open up the SOP every time because every time I forget a step, I forget to record the B roll, I forget to record something. And so I kind of don't agree with the last part of it because I'm such a goldfish that I assume at least some people need that reference. Jan. But in general, yes, it is on a schedule. Oh, I'm so happy to hear that Rick. Glad this is helpful. And the last piece here, I know because we have to pop off here. Organic Love asks what is the best way to approach a process driven SOP rather than user specific? I'm concerned about keeping the SOP updated regularly. Pull from Abby's example here. Have an individual person responsible. You can have that in your task management tool where you assign this out or you can just have someone's name up at the top. So this is Layla's sop and that owner has a routine to review that SOP either every time they do the task or a specific task. Just saying, hey Layla, review all your SOPs and make sure they're up to date. Or hey Layla, review this specific SOP every first Friday and make sure it's up to date. So pretty simple in that part. And it does become a part of training as well, which makes for a natural updating flow. Yes, absolutely. Organic Love, there is a some there's a lot of software out there. You can check out our channel for more. ClickUp, SmartSuite, all of those good tools out there, but you don't need something fancy, folks. You can get started with a Google Doc and that will do a huge, huge step forward. Over. Maybe just a word doc that's offline. So for more information on all of this stuff, be sure to check out our main channel. This concludes our livestream for today. Thank you for letting me get some of my work done here. This is pretty convenient. I got a little bit more polishing to do for sure, but if you enjoyed this video, please do like and subscribe. Let me know what ideas you have for future videos we could do. And I'm going to pause our video here and say thanks so much for joining me and enjoy the process. Everyone leave your comments below and I will catch them in the replay in case I miss them here. Bye Bye. Happy Weekend. Happy Friday. Happy all that day.