Create Visual SOP Documents that Drive Process Optimization, Not Just Peace of Mind

Change your focus from satisfying auditors to driving process optimization, consistent IT operations, and effective knowledge transfer.

Project Outline

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

Do your SOPs drive process optimization?

"Most organizations struggle to document and maintain SOPs as required, leading to process inconsistencies and inefficiencies. These breakdowns directly impact the performance of IT operations. Effective SOPs streamline training and knowledge transfer, improve transparency and compliance, enable automation, and ultimately decrease costs as processes improve and expensive breakdowns are avoided. Documenting SOPs is not just good practice; it directly impacts IT efficiency and your bottom line."

Frank Trovato, Senior Manager, Infrastructure Research Info-Tech Research Group

Our understanding of the problem

This Research Is Designed For:

• IT Process Owners
• IT Infrastructure Managers
• IT Service Managers
• System Administrators
• And more…

This Research Will Help You:

• Identify, prioritize, and document SOPs for critical business processes.
• Discover opportunities for overall process optimization by documenting SOPs.
• Develop documentation best practices that support ongoing maintenance and review.

This Research Will Also Assist:

• CTOs
• Business unit leaders

This Research Will Help Them:

• Understand the need for and value of documenting SOPs in a usable format.
• Help set expectations around documentation best practices.
• Extend IT best practices to other parts of the business.

Executive summary

Situation

• Most organizations know it is good practice to have SOPs as it improves consistency, facilitates process improvement, and contributes to efficient operations.
• Though the benefits are understood, many organizations don't have SOPs and those that do don't maintain them.

Complication

• Writing SOPs is the last thing most people want to do, so the work gets pushed down the priority list and the documents become dated.
• Promoting the use of SOPs can also face staff resistance as the documentation is seen as time consuming to develop and maintain, too convoluted to be useful, and generally out of date.

Resolution

• Overcome staff resistance while implementing a sustainable SOP documentation approach by doing the following:
• Create visual documents that can be scanned. Flowcharts, checklists, and diagrams are quicker to create, take less time to update, and are ultimately more usable than a dense manual.
• Use simple, but effective document management practices.
• Make SOPs part of your project deliverables rather than an afterthought. That includes checking documentation status as part of your change management process.
• Extend these principles to other areas of IT and business processes. The survey data and examples in this report include application development and business processes as well as IT operations.

Info-Tech Insight

1. Create visual documents, not dense SOP manuals.
2. Start with high-impact SOPs. Identify the most critical undocumented SOPs and document them first.
3. Integrate SOP creation into project requirements and create SOP approval steps to ensure documentation is reviewed and completed in a timely fashion.

Most organizations struggle to create and maintain SOP documents, especially in North America, despite the benefits

North American companies are traditionally more technology focused than process focused, and that is reflected in the approach to documenting SOPs.

• An ad hoc approach to SOPs almost certainly means documents will be out of date and ineffective. The same is also true when updating SOPs as part of periodic concerted efforts to prepare for an audit, annual review, or certification process, and this makes the task more imposing.
• Incorporating SOP updates as part of regular change management processes ensures documents are up to date and usable. This can also make reviews and audits much more manageable.

'It isn’t unusual for us to see infrastructure or operations documentation that is wildly out of date. We’re talking months, even years. Often it was produced as one big effort and then not reliably maintained.'

– Gary Patterson, Consultant, Quorum Resources

Organizations are most likely to update documents on an ad hoc basis or via periodic formal reviews. Less than 25% keep SOPs updated as needed.

Source: Info-Tech Research Group; N=104

Document SOPs to improve knowledge transfer, optimize processes, and ultimately save money

COBIT, ISO, and ITIL aren’t a complete solution

"Being ITIL and ISO compliant hasn’t solved our documentation problem. We’re still struggling."

– Vendor Relationship Manager, Financial Services Industry

• Adopting a framework such as ITIL, COBIT, or ISO doesn’t always mean that SOP documents are accurate, effective, or up to date.
• Although these frameworks emphasize the importance of documenting processes, they tend to focus more on process development and requirements than on actual documentation. In other words, they deal more with what needs to be done than with how to do it.
• This research will focus more on the documentation process itself – so how to go about creating, updating, optimizing, managing, and distributing SOP documents.

Inadequate SOPs lead to major data loss and over $99,000 in recovery costs

CASE STUDY 1

Company A mid-sized US organization with over 1,000 employees

Source Info-Tech Interview

Situation

• IT supports storage nodes replicated across two data centers. SOPs for backup procedures did not include an escalation procedure for failed backups or a step to communicate successful backups. Management was not aware of the issue and therefore could not address it before a failure occurred.

Incident

• Primary storage had a catastrophic failure, and that put pressure on the secondary storage, which then also failed. All active storage failed and the data corrupted. Daily backups were failing due to lack of disk space on the backup device. The organization had to resort to monthly tape backups.

Impact

• Lost 1 month of data (had to go back to the last tape backup).
• Recovery also took much longer because recovery procedures were also not documented.
• Key steps such as notifying impacted customers were overlooked. Customers were left unhappy not only with the outage and data loss but also the lack of communication.

Intangible costs

High “goodwill” impact for internal staff and customers.

"The data loss pointed out a glaring hole in our processes – the lack of an escalation procedure. If I knew backups weren’t being completed, I would have done something about that immediately."

– Senior Division Manager, Information Technology Division

IT services company optimizes its SOPs using “Lean” approach

CASE STUDY 2

Company Atrion

SourceInfo-Tech Interview

Lean and SOPs

• Standardized work is important to Lean’s philosophy of continuous improvement. SOPs allow for replication of the current best practices and become the baseline standard for member collaboration toward further improvements.
• For more on Lean’s approach to SOPs, see “Lean Six Sigma Quality Transformation Toolkit (LSSQTT) Tool #17.”

Atrion’s approach

• Atrion is focused on documenting high-level processes that improve the client and employee experience or which can be used for training.
• Cross-functional teams collaborate to document a process and find ways to optimize that SOP.
• Atrion leverages visual documentation as much as possible: flowcharts, illustrations, video screen captures, etc.

Outcomes

• Large increase in usable, up-to-date documentation.
• Process and efficiency improvements realized and made repeatable.
• Success has been so significant that Atrion is planning to offer SOP optimization training and support as a service for its clients in the future.

Atrion

• Atrion provides IT services, solutions, and leadership to clients in the 250+ user range.
• After adopting the Lean framework for its organization, it has deliberately focussed on optimizing its documentation.

When we initiated a formal process efficiency program a little over a year ago and began striving towards a culture of continuous improvement, documenting our SOPs became key. We capture how we do things today and how to make that process more efficient. We call it current state and future state mapping of any process.

– Michelle Pope, COO, Atrion Networking Corp.

Strategies to overcome common documentation challenges

Use Info-Tech’s methodology to streamline the SOP documentation process.

Use this blueprint as a building block to complete these other Info-Tech projects

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Improve reporting and management of incidents and build service request workflows.

Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

Define appropriate objectives for DR, build a roadmap to close gaps, and document your incident response plan.

Extend the Service Desk to the Enterprise

Position IT as an innovator.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Create Visual SOP Documents – project overview

Workshop overview

Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

Measured value for Guided Implementations (GIs)

Engaging in GIs doesn’t just offer valuable project advice, it also results in significant cost savings.

Note: Documenting SOPs provides additional benefits that are more difficult to quantify: reducing the time spent by staff to find or execute processes, improving transparency and accountability, presenting opportunities for automation, etc.

Phase 1

Prioritize, Optimize, and Document Critical SOPs

Create Visual SOP Documents that Drive Process Optimization, Not Just Peace of Mind

Phase 1 outline

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

Guided Implementation 1: Prioritize, optimize, and document critical SOPs

Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 2 weeks

Step 1.1: Prioritize SOPs

Start with an analyst kick off call:

• Apply a client focus to critical IT services.
• Identify undocumented, critical SOPs.

Then complete these activities…

• Rank and prioritize your SOP documentation needs.

With this template:

Standard Operating Procedures Workbook

Step 1.2: Develop visual documentation

Review findings with analyst:

• Understand the benefits of a visual approach.
• Review possibilities for visual documentation.

Then complete these activities…

• Identify formats that can improve your SOP documentation.

With these templates:

• Example DRP Process Flows
• Example App Dev Process And more…

Step 1.3: Optimize and document critical processes

Finalize phase deliverable:

• Two visual SOP documents, mapped using a tabletop exercise.

Then complete these activities…

• Create the visual SOP.
• Review and optimize the process.

With this tool:

SOP Project Roadmap Tool

Phase 1 Results & Insights:

Identify opportunities to deploy visual documentation, and follow Info-Tech’s process to capture steps, gaps, and opportunities to improve IT processes.

Focus first on client-facing and high-impact SOPs

IT’s number one obligation to internal and external customers is to keep critical services running – that points to mission-critical operations, service management, and disaster recovery.

Understand what makes an application or service mission critical

When email or a shared drive goes down, it may impact productivity, but may not be a significant impact to the business. Ask these questions when assessing whether an application or service is mission critical.

"Email and other Windows-based applications are important for our day-to-day operations, but they aren’t critical. We can still manufacture and ship clothing without them. However, our manufacturing systems, those are absolutely critical"

– Bob James, Technical Architect, Carhartt, Inc.