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I Am InLegal & Industry Standard Status
Our Standard Operating Procedures are not legal documents. We have a set of templates that we have developed over many years that are designed to assist MSPs in recording their organizational knowledge into a format that ensures consistency and effectiveness in transferring that knowledge to staff in an easy to understand manner. If your SOPs are required to be legally binding or need to adhere to specific industry standards then we can work with the specialist organizations that can produce a product at that level however we do not offer that level of service at this point.
I wrote an article on the 5 main differences between a SOP and KB here as well as 10 tips on creating the best SOPs, so if you are not sure then take a read of those first.
The definition can be a little fluid however the way we treat SOPs differently from Knowledgebase articles is that SOPs are strictly non technical related documentation that is based on transferring organizational general purpose knowledge such as dress standards, lunch times and how leave works and how to apply for it.
We deploy the SOPs in the same way we deploy the knowledgebase by using your documentation platform such as IT Glue or Hudu.
In our experience, the SOPs are often a task that has been spread over many years using many different staff & because of this, it is often a worthwhile exercise to include this in the project.
Below are a range of 100% human created articles for your viewing pleasure.We provide a standalone project which helps managed service providers implement a standard operating procedure.
SOPs or standard operating procedures are a very important part of running a business not only because they help with the smooth operations of the business and allow the business to both scale upwards as well as down depending on the circumstances, they also help significantly when it comes time to sell your MSP business.
A business able to run itself without the constant presence of the owner is far more valuable at sale time than a business which requires the owner to be present just to function. Lets face it, if the owner is required then the business is often a well paid job with far more risk, sometimes not even that.
We initially take time to review your business and determine if you are operating with any SOPs. While it is rare that a business will operate without any instructions that could be termed standard operating procedures, documentation is often very informal and scattered in a variety of places with no structure and it is obvious that no planning has ever gone into an SOP framework.
Once the SOP audit is completed, we then undertake a written report where we will either sit down with the owner or executive team (virtual meetings are the most common these days) and work through our findings.
Once reviewed and our recommendations approved (after any requested adjustments) we will do a more comprehensive search for material already created that can be used and implemented.
This material will likely be in the form of random documents that have been created over many years. They will be found in company folders, on desktops, in Sharepoint, recycle bins, emails, PDFs and in Teams or Skype chats. Our search will be exhaustive as these documents when found will give us the best glimpse of your company's culture and how you want things to run.
As mentioned in the article I wrote - 5 differences between standard operating procedures and knowledge bases, the two sources are often confused and what they see most often is a hybrid monstrosity that combines both types of information in one spot.
This is a terrible situation because you should be attempting to mirror your own company knowledge base so that it shares most of its articles with the standard client knowledge base. By having a generic component that forms the majority of your knowledge base it means you can duplicate it with a copy and paste into every single one of your clients.
The problem arises when you have a mixture of internal guidelines that should be separated into the SOP inside your KB. Often SOP articles are sensitive in nature and not something you want clients to see. It may not be world ending however clients likely do not want to be looking at articles specifying dress codes or the process involved in raising a complaint against another employee.
This means of course you cannot do a straight copy or paste of the majority of a KB into a new client. This is borne out when I have reviewed organizations that have a KSBOP hybrid monster.
They approach this by starting from scratch every single time they have a new client, yes, each client has a different KB structure and each time during the client onboarding one of their staff creates a new folder structure and possibly copies a couple of generic documents to start them off.
All of this wastes significant time and causes user onboarding to take excessive amounts of time.
We will have collected every document that we can find that could be considered a standard operating procedure and reviewed each one of those documents to understand the culture of your business.
We will establish the gaps that your procedures potentially have. Often these documents have been written over a decade by countless employees some of which are no longer with you. So we will take time working through these examples with you and establishing which parts and which procedures are now outdated and if they should be eliminated completely or adjusted to reflect current standards.
On average, organizations that have not had an official SOP or had anyone assigned to managing one will have less than 30% of the material required to complete an effective SOP.
We have created a SOP template created over the last 10 years that we will use to highlight the areas that are potentially missing.
This is where every organization is different and what is important to you is not important to others and vice versa. We will complete a checklist of existing documentation as well as the SOP articles that are missing and that are considered necessary by you.
We have a base framework of SOP folders based on the ITGlue documentation platform that we like to use and our experience demonstrates it is the most effective in an MSP environment. We use the same framework regardless as to the documentation platform that you use, it could be Hudu or Sharepoint or even a set of folders on a NAS drive.
We take that base structure and modify it based on your organization's needs using the checklist created during the previous meeting.
We take the existing SOP information found to be used within your organization and update each article so that it is current and then eliminate any redundant or superseded information.
Often at this point we will also have to combine several items of documentation into one document. One of the issues with having an SOP structure created over a long time frame involving lots of different people is the occurrence of repeating the same work over and over again and even worse, not deleting the old superseded information.
It is not as simple as straight up deleting the old documentation because we often find that the old versions will contain useful and current information that is not in the new versions. This happens all the time so we need to ensure that important steps are not removed by assuming the old version is useless.
We also import or rewrite existing SOPs into the correct and agreed upon tone and branding with which you want all of your SOPs to reflect.
We normalize the words used as well as apply a universal formatting including adhering to rules such as when to use bullet points, how many spaces between paragraphs and how long paragraphs should be. All of these factors determine trust in the information. If they all appear significantly different to each other then trust is lost by your employees.
This is done at the time of either rewriting the articles or at import if using something like the IT Glue app. If you use a documentation platform then the SOP needs to be integrated into that platform. It takes time but why have a documentation management platform if you are not going to use it?
Once existing SOP articles have been converted and placed into the correct area of the SOP structure, we then create new SOPs based on the requirements checklist filled out.
This is created in a way that makes full use of the ITGlue or Hudu page indexing feature so that your staff are presented with a single area with which to access any SOP required.
All articles are named using an agreed to and logical naming convention.
Once all of the SOP articles are completed and the SOP structure is finalized along with any implemented workflow rules and or integration with third party applications, we will undertake a period of staff training involving the creation of training material in the form of both videos, how to articles, training sessions and one on one training if required.
Once staff have been trained in how to access the SOP and on the requirements for updating it we will at that time look to sign off on the project
From there we can either leave your organization to manage the SOPs themselves or alternatively we do offer service agreements where we manage the documentation component of your business.
There are many good reasons as an MSP to have an external company manage your internal documentation which I have written about in another article here.
Our team specializes in strategies for IT help desk providers and we assist in improving profit margins through standardization and consistent record keeping strategies, so you can be confident that our content is tailored to your needs.
Please feel free to explore our other articles and click on any that interest you. If you have any questions or would like to learn more about how we can help you with your documentation needs, please click the "Get In Touch" button to the left and we will be happy to assist you. Thank you for choosing us as your trusted source for technology documentation.
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