Why SOPs are the Hero

"Nothing was ready for the war that everyone expected..." War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy.

SOPs (standard operating procedures) are a series of lists that tell you how to do something. More specifically, how your company likes something done by anyone in the company so there are some uniformity, reliability, and resilience built in the system.

Are they a pain to create and take time to do properly? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes. Too often I see people relegating SOP writing to some task they'll get around to doing eventually but always get pushed back down the line and "eventually" is a target on the horizon you never meet. Hmmm, kind of like business continuity...but that's also why having SOPs are a big foundation of a business continuity plan.

Are you too small to do SOPs? Nope. The smaller, the more important I'd say. If you are a solopreneur (like me), first, it keeps you honest so you don't engage in shortcuts and forget things that don't apply 100% of the time. Second, if something were to happen to me and I couldn't work for a certain amount of time, I could have someone do some basic administrative tasks, like notifying clients, without me having to do it myself or standing over their shoulder. That's part of succession planning...which is also a foundation of business continuity.

Before AI became the issue du jour with respect to taking jobs, SOPs got some of that slack. What? Yep. People would push back on making SOPs because of job security (which, ironically, can cause business death and the jobs go with it). Are SOPs making the employee non-unique or replaceable? Yes, but not for the reason you think. The goal is sustained operations even at a degraded level. Resumption to normal operations is another thing. You not being there is not normal. You can be replaced temporarily to sustain operations and a lower-than-expected output level. It's a quality factor and normal hasn't resumed yet.

And also, no: you can't be made non-unique. I can hand you a slide deck and you can deliver the information in it, which is the basic goal, but you will not be able to do it like I can, especially if I wrote the content based on my experience. In the military, every job I had there as a training slide deck that a JAG (what I was) had to deliver to train soldiers on something legal. The first time I did a law of armed conflict training, it was not the same as when I did it a year later. I was more familiar with the material, had gained more training and knowledge myself as I was preparing to deploy, and was much better at my delivery, adding in my own snippets. It was part of a standard training packet. The soldiers were required to have the training. Who did it mattered for impact, but not for checking the box.

Do not treat SOPs as checking the box.

Do not treat business continuity as checking the box.

And like a continuity plan, SOPs need to be regularly maintained and updated. Like a BCP, an SOP can be updated (at least reviewed for potential updates) annually or when there is a big change (growth, down-sizing, new technology, new leader).

Why did I start with the Tolstoy quote? Not having SOPs ready for the events that we all expect is a sure-fire way to meet very difficult times (at best) or cause the business to fail (at worst). SOPs prepare you for disasters and disruptions so it becomes live training instead of a battle. SOPs are the hero. And so are you for doing them.