The Five Rules Nobody Tells You About SOP Implementation

Part 4: Every Process Needs an Owner

In the last newsletter, we talked about Rule #3: If People Can't Find the SOP, They Won't Use the SOP.

But let's assume you've solved that problem.

Your SOPs are organized.
Employees can find them.
Managers use them for training and coaching.

You're done, right? Not quite.

Because there's another problem that quietly kills even the best SOP systems.

Things change.

You update your software.
You buy a new piece of equipment.
A customer changes their requirements.
Someone discovers a faster way to do something.

And little by little, the way your employees actually do the work becomes different from what's written in the SOP.

Eventually someone opens the process and says: "Oh... we don't do it that way anymore."

Once employees stop trusting the SOPs, they stop using them.

This brings us to Rule #4: Every Process Needs an Owner

Here's the important distinction:

The person who owns the process doesn't necessarily have to be the person who uses or follows the process.

A Process Owner is simply the person responsible for making sure the process works and stays current.

Here are three things every Process Owner should do.

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1. Watch for Changes

Let's say your CRM software, or your Project Management software goes through an automatic update. This happens all the time. Small changes, and sometimes radical changes. A button moves. A drop down menu changes.

The steps in your SOP are now wrong.

Someone needs to notice.

The same thing happens when your employees improve a process.

Your superstar CSR figures out a slightly better way to handle a customer complaint.
Your Service Manager finds a faster way to schedule technicians.
Your estimator develops a shortcut that saves 15 minutes on every estimate.

Those little improvements matter.

The Process Owner's job is to capture them.

Otherwise, the best way of doing something stays trapped inside one person's head and you're right back to people-dependency.

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2. Keep the SOP Current

This doesn't need to become somebody's full-time job.

When something changes, update the process. That's it.

The goal isn't to create the world's most perfect SOP.

The goal is to make sure the documented process still reflects the best way your company currently knows how to do the work.

Because once employees discover that your SOPs are outdated, they stop trusting all of them.

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3. Review Important Processes Regularly – Have a Schedule

Don't wait until something breaks.

Some businesses assign Process Owners to review their important SOPs once every quarter.

The review can be simple:

Is this still how we do it?
Has anything changed?
Has anyone found a better way?
Does the SOP need to be updated?

'Field Test' the SOP. By that I mean, run through the process exactly as it is written as if you do NOT know how to do what needs to be done.

Ten minutes may be all it takes.

But that ten-minute review can prevent an SOP from slowly becoming irrelevant.

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The Bigger Picture

There's another reason Process Ownership matters.

As your company grows, you cannot continue being the owner of every process.

That's just another form of owner-dependency.

The owner shouldn't be responsible for noticing every change, approving every improvement, and keeping every SOP current.

As you grow, this is an impossibility.

In fact, sooner or later, if you're not doing a process, you're going to forget how the process gets done.

Your managers and key employees need to begin owning the systems within their areas of responsibility. That's how you build a company that can scale with control and confidence.

And it's how you move another step closer to Operational Independence, a thriving business that continues to improve whether you're there or not.

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Action Item

Pick five important processes in your business this week.
Assign an owner to each of the processes.
Ask the employee, the owner of the process to 'Field Test' the SOP and have them report back to you on their findings.
Then establish and implement a schedule for reviewing those 5 processes.

Then 'rinse and repeat'. Pick another 5 processes and do it again.

Because an SOP without an owner will eventually become outdated. And an outdated SOP eventually becomes an SOP nobody uses.

Next in the series: Rule #5... What Gets Reinforced Gets Repeated.