The SOP Writing Kit

An SOP people use is one page, written in the words of the person doing the job, and verified by someone who wasn't in the room when it was written. This guide gives you a fill-in template, a recording method that produces the first draft without you typing it, and a review cycle that keeps the document matching reality after the process changes.

1. The direct answer

Don't write SOPs. Record someone doing the work, transcribe it, cut the transcript down to a one-page document, then hand that document to a person who has never done the task and watch them fail. Fix what they got stuck on. That's the whole method. The writing is the small part; the watching is where the value is.

Budget roughly 90 minutes per SOP end to end: 20 minutes recording, 20 minutes editing, 30 minutes for the first live test, 20 minutes fixing.

2. Why most process documentation fails