Writing procedures that last

Notes from a recent job where I was updating Standard Operating Procedures for a client.

Principles for Procedures

I’m applying these principles:

We can read the step column alone and get a sense of what’s going on.
We’ll do the process maps when we’ve got the steps right
Whenever we refer to a document we’ll link to the SharePoint folder where it lives. If it doesn’t (yet) live in SharePoint let’s put it there. (in the short term, we’ll take details and deal with the change later; avoiding one drive personal drives)
If we name a person we’ll name their role, so that the procedures outlast individuals
You can’t give actions to a group. It must be a delegated person.
As far as possible procedures are in the active tense (The data analyst tests the dashboard) not the passive tense (The dashboard is tested).
There is no lack of space, so we spell out acronyms and shortened words
We use styles within the key documents, so it is easy to keep them consistent
As far as possible we avoid “corporate spam” where we cc everyone in a list as a part of the procedure.
Every process has a process owner
Once a process is updated and documented for audit, we need to start a change management piece to embed any improvements