Operations
SOPs nobody follows: procedures that survive handover
Almost every growing company has a folder of standard operating procedures. Few of them describe how the work is actually done today. They were written for an audit or a new hire, filed, and slowly overtaken by reality. A procedure nobody follows is worse than none, because it gives the impression of control without the substance.
Why procedures go unused
They usually fail for one of four reasons.
- Written by the wrong person. A manager writes the procedure from memory, describing how the work should be done. The people who do it every day were not asked, and the document misses the steps that matter.
- Written for the wrong reader. Long, formal documents written to satisfy an auditor are unusable at the point of work.
- Never tested. Nobody checked whether a new person could do the job from the document alone.
- Never owned. When the process changed, nobody was responsible for changing the document, so it drifted out of date and lost its authority.
How to write one that gets used
Start by watching the work. Follow a real job from start to finish and write down what actually happens, including the workarounds. The differences between the procedure on file and the work on the floor are where the problems live.
Write it with the people who do it. They are the experts. A procedure they helped write is one they will follow, and one they will tell you is wrong when it is.
Keep it short and in order. One page where possible. Numbered steps, each starting with a verb. Put the reason next to any step that looks optional, because people skip steps they do not understand.
Mark the critical steps. Most steps tolerate small variation. A few do not: a check, a measurement, a sign-off. Make those few unmistakable.
Put it where the work happens. At the workstation, in the system screen, on the checklist the operator already uses, not in a shared drive.
How to keep it true
Writing a good procedure is the easy half. Keeping it accurate as the work changes is where most organisations fail.
- Give every procedure an owner, one named person accountable for its accuracy.
- Set a review date. Once a year at least, and whenever the process, the system or the product changes.
- Make it easy to flag a problem. The person who notices the procedure is wrong should be able to say so in seconds, and should see the fix.
- Audit by observation. Periodically watch the work and compare it with the document. If they differ, decide which one is right, and change the other.
- Retire what is dead. A procedure for a process that no longer exists erodes trust in all the others.
What good looks like
A procedure that survives handover is one a capable new person can follow on their first day, that the experienced team agrees describes the work, and that someone is responsible for keeping true. It reads less like a policy and more like a well-made checklist.
Procedures are one part of a working quality system; the others are clear standards, built-in checks and a review that acts on what it finds. For the measurement side, see first-pass yield as a quality metric.
If you would like a quick view of where your operation stands, the free eight-minute Operations Health Check is a good place to start.