A year ago I was told that I needed to read and understand 13 (out of 67) company “Standard Operating Procedures” (SOPs).  Until that time, I had no comprehension of what an SOP was, and after I read through the towering stack, I still couldn’t figure out what they were, or why it was so important that I become familiar with them.  Let me rephrase this: it took me 3 valuable hours to read materials that I didn’t understand, but that were in theory supposed to help me do a better job as Director of Design Research.  As I began speaking to my colleagues across the company – those in Design, Manufacturing and Quality, for example, I learned that they too found them difficult to understand and follow.   Clearly, something had to change.

After some internal discussion, we realized that our company would benefit from a complete review of the entire body of SOP’s.  We reflected on the fact that we are in the business of designing and improving products and services for usability, so we should be quite capable of revising our “bread-and-butter” directives into a more user-friendly set of processes.  It took us a full year to do it, but by defining the SOP users and what their (our) capabilities are, we developed a new, improved set of SOP’s that are easier to read, easier to train on, and most importantly, easier to understand. Our enhanced SOP elements included the use of lay language, the removal of duplicate information, the use of universal iconic graphics to replace dense text, and the application of information hierarchy to guide the eye. 

We took the opportunity to showcase the SOPs at our open-house MIX event last week where a diverse group of clients (and others) spent a few hours browsing through the work that we do. I was asked to be one of the exhibitors to share our SOP reconstruction process with visitors.  I was sure that I would be talking to myself most for most of the evening about how critical it is to redefine what an SOP can be, but I was pleasantly surprised. Many visitors were very interested in understanding why and how we challenged the traditional construction of SOPs, and I suppose that makes sense as our clients would want to be assured that we have actually increased the value of our SOP’s and therefore improved the safety and quality processes for their projects. 

We are currently rolling out the first of these revised SOP’s to our employees, and we are all looking forward to the day when we can officially retire the last of those 67 mind-numbing, sleep-inducing process documents.