Standard operating procedure
A written procedure for work that repeats — the thing that lets a task leave your head without leaving your standard behind.
A standard operating procedure is a written description of how a repeating task gets done: the steps, in order, with the decisions named and the finished state described. It is the artefact that makes work delegable, because the alternative to writing it down is teaching it verbally, once per person, forever.
The test of a good one is that someone competent but new can complete the task without asking you a question. That bar rules out most process documents, which describe what happens rather than what to do, and skip exactly the parts the author has stopped noticing. Write it while doing the task, not from memory, and have the first new person edit it as they follow it.
The reason it matters beyond efficiency is standard. Delegation without a written procedure does not transfer the work at a lower quality; it transfers it at an unpredictable quality, which costs more to check than it saved to hand over.
Worked: onboarding a client takes you 90 minutes and gets done differently each time. Written down, it becomes 14 steps, three of which needed a decision you had never articulated. An assistant now runs it in 60 minutes with two things escalated, and the review takes ten minutes rather than the whole task back.
Also known as
- SOP
- playbook
- process doc
Relevant for
- Creators
- Write the procedure while you do the task, not afterwards — the steps you have stopped noticing are exactly the ones an editor or assistant will get wrong.
- Business owners
- Handing work over without a written procedure does not lower quality, it makes quality unpredictable — and checking unpredictable work costs more than delegating saved.