A breakdown of wikis, SOPs, policies, and playbooks: what each one is, when to use it, and how they fit into your business systems. The speaker walks through real examples from ClickUp and Member Vault to show the difference between a knowledge base that answers questions and a step-by-step procedure you follow every time.
What's the difference between a wiki, sop, Policy Handbook playbook and Policy binder? No, this is not the opening to the world's worst process related pun. This is an actual question that has been emailed in to me from one of you who had this question when it came to the semantics of the process world. And I thought it was a pretty good question so I thought I would make a whole video about it. So if you are wondering the difference between these terms here, you're watching the right video. Now, the key thing to remember about these content containers, now really we want to think about the left side of the slide here as being the actual original Process HQ template that is kind of the backbone of the way we suggest folks get started and ClickUp very quickly. So if you're looking at this and you're like, ooh, I really like this idea. I like this concept of having it all together and having categories for each, definitely check out the blueprint. It'll be linked in the description below. Or go to ProcessDriven co blueprint. The blueprint is a free training I offer that helps it all kind of come together in a more abstract layer than these tutorials on YouTube. I'm going to go now. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you guys so much for watching and enjoy the process system. And with a wiki, generally, there's no real purpose to it. It's kind of like a collection of random knowledge. Much like Wikipedia. A wiki might include general information about a topic and and in other words, what you might potentially want to know someday. If this sounds really vague, it's because it kind of is. And as we contrast it with the other two types, it'll probably make more sense to you. But one example of a wiki is one here from my own ClickUp account. Now, it's a little bit blurry, but what this is showing you is the formatting we use inside Member Vault. And if you'd like to learn more about Member Vault, you'd probably also enjoy this video where John and I kind of geek out about membervault, among other things. But in this wiki, the key things to note are that we have kind of a title that describes the basic topic. Then we just have a collection of copy and paste resources that we might be able to potentially use in our lessons. These are different styles for how we organize a certain block of text. This basically just allows us to have consistent formatting by copying and pasting rather than typing something from scratch each time. This, to me falls into the wiki category because it's not telling you how to do something specific, much like a reference sheet, which I talk about in this video. Beyond wikis, we get into the sops land. Sops are are standard operating procedures. Which just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? SOPs are how you actually do things. So the wikis were what, like, what would you possibly Want to know? SOPs are how would you do whatever it is you need to do? Whereas the wiki might say, here's all the styling we use for our member vault lessons, the SOP would say here's how to create a member vault lesson. See the difference there? The how versus just some general info. Most of the time you can tell something is an SOP because it includes step by step instructions. Something like step one, get bread, step two, put it in toaster, et cetera. As you can see here, this is one very simple SOP that we have in our own workspace for prepping our weekly review, if you didn't know. Every single Tuesday, my co host and I, we go live inside our membership community to answer Q and A from the past week, go over ClickUp updates as well as highlight any big happenings inside the community in a live stream we call the Weekly Review. And the Weekly Review, you guessed it, is governed by this process here. So this SOP is actually telling us how to prepare for the weekly review each week. Ooh. And if you're a ClickUp user who's kind of confused by why I'm using tasks here instead of documents, you probably want to watch this video here. But that is an sop. The third unique content type is a policy. I like to think of policies as the rules for how decisions should be made. It's really the why behind the sops you might see. So whenever we're looking for policies, a good place to look is an employee handbook. Here's an example of our handbook here. Basically saying, don't be a jerk to other people if you do, here's what happens. Here's the disciplinary actions. Your HR department is very well poised to have some firm policies to protect your people. And so when we think of policies, that's usually my go to example would be an hr. Although they can certainly apply in any application, any rules you have for how decisions are made, that's a policy. Now from here I want to talk about the content containers. Now remember containers, they're not unique content types of their own. They're just kind of like mixtapes of the other pieces of content we already talked about the very first content container I want to talk about here is a knowledge base or knowledge bases. Knowledge bases are primarily collections of wikis, but they can often include policies and sometimes sops. You can already see how blurry these containers can become because people use the same term for many different things. But generally speaking, when I'm thinking knowledge base, I'm thinking a collection of information maybe shows me something for a specific purpose, but most of the time it just shows me general information. A good example of this might be the ClickUp help docs that show you information about just about anything inside ClickUp's account. The next content type is a playbook. Now, a playbook is primarily used when you're talking about SOPs, because Playbook is very action oriented. It's about what do you do, what is next, go, go, go, that kind of thing. I wish I did sports, so I would have a better analogy. But if you were a sporter and you know how there's like plays that you do, that's basically what we're alluding to here. The plays or behaviors that you can do. And occasionally you might find things like wikis about general information or policies as to why you do those plays. But in general, Playbook focused on action and.
