Sales standard operating procedure for product quality

How to create outlook signature

I think one of the most common myths I hear about standard operating procedures is that standard operating procedures or SOPs take a really long time. And the fact is, the way most people suggest creating SOPs, they do take a really long time. And I, like many of you, do not have an excess of time. I'm not a business owner who's running a team and running a community and running a membership and creating YouTube content. And I'm sitting there thinking, Man, I would love to just spend 4 hours writing down how to do this one process in my business. No, and I don't really believe those people who enjoy spending 4 hours creating an eight page Google Doc outlining how to record a video. I don't believe those people actually exist. While I know there are many people out there who prescribe SOP creation as this multi hour affair of this very thorough document that is ISO certified. And yes, for some people, that may be necessary for most people, including you, who I'm guessing is a small team leader, a business owner, a freelancer or a nonprofit leader. You don't have that kind of time. You don't want to waste that kind of time on creating a process that takes you hours and hours and hours to document. So in this video, I want to bust that myth. I want to illustrate in almost real time what it actually takes to create an SOP using our method for creating SOPs that is far simpler than all the other things you're going to see here on YouTube when it comes to SOP creation. My approach to creating SOP involves three steps, and many of you probably have heard this if you watch our original the Three Steps to Building Systems video up here. But I want to go through these in detail today. So when it comes to actually creating an SOP, we're gonna be starting off with a template. That templates gonna look like this. The three sections in this template are purpose, procedure, and FAQs. Now, I've talked about this template in detail in this video. If you want to watch that, but for today, we're just gonna leave it at that three sections inside those sections, the one that takes people the most time. The stuff that's really SOP-y is that procedure area where you're writing down the actual steps. This is the area where I see so many people on YouTube and in videos and in fancy business books prescribing that you waste hours of your life writing out everything and screenshotting everything that could possibly happen. What I'm going to suggest to you is to scrap that advice today. And instead, in that procedure area, write down the start and the stop of a process. When does it start? When does it end? Your start and your stop should all represent a process that can be done in one sitting, which to me, is about 90 minutes. So if you're looking to do something that takes more than 90 minutes. This might actually be two different processes that you want to document. So for this example, I'm actually going to be building a process with you along with you in this video. And the process I'm going to be focused on is how to edit YouTube videos in house using Premiere Pro. So we use Premiere Pro, that's our software. And when we want to create a video and we're going to edit it ourselves, I want to write down how exactly that happens. So in theory, I could train someone else on my team to do it so we can have inhouse production of our YouTube content. For me, the start of this process is going to be you get a video, and the stop of this process is going to be you have a finished edited video. That's my start and my stop. What I want to avoid here is creating a process that's absolutely huge. For example, how to create a YouTube video. If I were to create a process on that, that is a huge process that takes multiple days, ten plus hours to create a video. And that is far too much to put all into one process. So I'm zooming in to just the editing, and that's where I'm going to create an SOP yes, I still eventually want to figure out how one level up the whole YouTube video comes together, but it's going to be made of a bunch of smaller SOPs rather than creating one large 50 page document, defining all of our processes. By picking a small process, a sub process, that's what's going to allow us to not waste tons and tons of hours on this and do it in smaller chunks. Once I have my start and my stop, I want to go through and outline the steps. The major steps in this process. If I know them off the top of my head, I'm gonna start drafting them here. So it might look something like this. But occasionally what I think are the steps aren't actually the steps, because I do something so often I just kind of skip things that I know to do. So what I'll probably do while creating this process is work on. Well, this video. So as I'm editing this video, I'll realize, oh, shoot, I actually need to fill right with left and apply that effect to all of the audio. That's why I like to draft the steps just from the armchair, just thinking about it. But sometimes it's helpful to actually do the process while thinking about the major steps just to make sure nothing is missed. The first time I try to write down these steps. I'm gonna be doing it from the armchair, meaning I'm just gonna be sitting here thinking, what are my major steps in the process? And I'm gonna write each one of those out. In this example, you can see I'm using a ClickUp task, and I'm using a toggle which is a formatting option that's available in ClickUp as well as notion and other tools to make expanding sections so that my SOP just looks a little cleaner. Now once I have my start, my stop and my steps, I'm ready to start adding some additional details. Now for my own personal preference. I like to do this while actually doing the task. In this instance. I am I don't know, not the expert because I barely know what I'm doing the video editing, but I am the person who currently does the process and I'm also the person who will be continuing to do the process at least at this point in time. So I'm able to fill in the details of this SOP by actually doing the task on my own. Generally speaking, you want to have the information, the knowledge that goes into the SOP coming from whoever is the expert on your team, and if you don't have anyone that could also be YouTube. But you want some kind of expert input. And whoever's writing the SOP is the person you want to have doing the task on a day to day. In this case, I am the most knowledgeable person on our team about YouTube. So check. I also know I'm gonna probably be referencing some YouTube videos check and when it comes to a writing SOP since I'll be the one doing it, I am also the person who will be writing it. If I was working on another process where I was delegating something, I might be the knowledgeable expert dictating to someone who's going to then do the task and they would be the one writing if that's a new concept for you, I would definitely suggest you watch this video after this one here because it'll probably answer some more questions that you didn't yet know to ask. All right, so now that I know my start stop in steps, I have my expert input both from myself and from YouTube. And I also have the person doing the task which happens to be me. I'm ready to start actually writing this SOP out. What I'm gonna do to do that is expand each of these toggles and write in some quick notes. I'm trying to be as brief and bulleted as possible and only include images, screenshots or videos if I absolutely need to or if it's a lot faster than writing things out in text. In general, I want to put as much text as possible because it's easier to edit and easier to skim than what we would have inside a video or a clip. Alright, so as I'm writing this out, you can already see it's starting to take shape. You can also see how brief each section is. That is what we're aiming for. That is how we're going to make this whole process take 20 minutes and not 2 hours. We're being specific yet brief in writing all of this out. We don't even need to use full sentences. Bullet points are often enough. Once we fast forward a bit, I will have finished writing out each of these steps, and then we're able to take a step back and take a broader look at our actual process. At this point, I might want to add some FAQs that pop up into my head or problems that I know often come up. I might want to add those in, but otherwise this process is done. This process is ready for its first trial. So what happens now is I'm going to take this process and the next time I'm editing a video, I'm going to pull it up and I'm going to edit it as I'm editing my video, I'm going to look at this SOP and change anything that was missing add a little bit more details. And that second draft might take me five to ten minutes and you can see how long this first draft took me. Overall, this is a very little by little approach to creating a process, and it does not have to take long. If you could not tell by me creating this live on this video, could you add more details to this? Absolutely. You might prefer to add inputs and outputs, or add a required material section, or add a sanity check list of how you know when you're done, final things to check for that kind of stuff. You can add additional sections here, but that's what those additional ten minutes are for. You may revisit this process every time you edit and adjust it for five minutes. Just it for two minutes, just one word each time you do it. And that's okay. But for this first draft, if you want to say, hey, I have a process round one process in my business, this is all it needs to be. This does not need to be complicated. I hope this is helpful for you as an almost real time example of how to create an SOP on your own for your business to document how things work, how to do it in little chunks, not giant hours and hours, and how it can indeed be done in less than 20 minutes. If you just focus in and focus on the start, stop and steps and fill in details as you go along. If you have any questions about this video, please do leave them in the comments below. And if this was helpful to you because I know this is a little bit different for us, please do like and subscribe and let me know again in those comments below. We'll be back here next time with another video about ClickUp, process and everything in between. And if you want to see more videos around this kind of topic, I would definitely check out this playlist here. Thank you guys so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.