Standard Operating Procedure Writing Course

This week we start a series of articles on how to write Standard Operating Procedures (also called SOPs). The aim is to introduce the key concepts involved in:

• Designing
• Writing
• Formatting
• Testing and
• Maintaining Procedures

These tutorials look at how you can organize a team of writers who can write procedures to an acceptable level, so your company is better organized, both internally (such as Operations) and externally (e.g. Customer Support).

We will start with the basics and then show you how to write clear, unambiguous, easy-to-follow procedures.

After these lessons, we will then look at more complicated areas, such as:

• how to get funding for your project (if there are no procedure writers in your company)
• how to work with technical writers, who may be able to support your project
• how to use naming conventions so that you can find the documents more easily once they have been archived.
• how you can maintain the procedures after they have been released. 

Writing Standard Operating Procedures

The process of developing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) involves ten steps.

The approach we will use is to assume that you are starting from scratch and want to develop your SOPs in a structured manner. This means that along with writing the SOPs, you will also have them written in a way that allows others to find them, update them and share them where necessary.

• Define Your Goals
• Get a Budget
• Create the Documentation Plan
• Get Support from Management
• Hire the Procedure Writing Team
• Define Templates and Style Guides
• Create Naming Conventions
• Create Numbering System
• Gather Information
• Examine Current As-Is Processes
• Identify weaknesses in current Process
• Draft To Be Processes
• Review Processes with SMEs and Users
• Write Procedures and process maps
• Test the Procedures
• Sign-Off the Procedures
• Release the Procedures
• Publish to different formats, such as PDF, HTML, XML
• Maintain the Procedures
• Backup Procedures
• Archive Procedures where necessary

How about Style Guides and Templates?

We will also look at how to setup style guide, templates, and adopt naming conventions for all procedures.

What else will the course include?

Some of the other topics will include:

• How to define the role and purpose of SOPs
• How to conduct a Needs Assessment
• How to define a SOP
• How to evaluate SOPs
• How to create SOP templates
• How to format SOPs, Process, and Flowcharts
• How to implement SOPs
• How to maintain SOPs

At the end of the course, We will share some free sample SOPs and other resources that will help you write your procedures.

That¡¯s it for now.

From tomorrow, we will begin to walk you through the entire process and look at each step involved in creating your procedures.

If there is something that you¡¯d like us to clarify or expand upon then please share it in the comments section below.

See you then.

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