What is a standard operating procedure (SOP)?

A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a set of step-by-step instructions compiled by an organization to help workers carry out complex routine operations. SOPs aim to achieve efficiency, quality output and uniformity of performance while reducing miscommunication and non-compliance with industry regulations. They are essential in maintaining consistency in the quality of products and services, ensuring that tasks are completed correctly and on time. An SOP is not just a document; it’s a systematic approach to doing things right.

Why are SOPs important?

SOPs are vital for businesses because they provide a roadmap for daily operations, ensuring that every task is performed consistently and effectively. They are particularly crucial for IT professionals, for whom precision and adherence to protocols are paramount. SOPs reduce the likelihood of errors and increase operational efficiency, which can directly impact a company’s bottom line. They also facilitate training and onboarding, helping new employees understand their roles and responsibilities clearly. In essence, SOPs are not just about maintaining quality — they are about enhancing overall business performance.

What are the common types of SOPs?

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are fundamental tools for ensuring consistency and efficiency in various business processes. They vary based on the industry, department and the specific functions they are designed to streamline. Here’s a closer look at some common types of SOPs and their respective use cases:

Step-by-step SOPs: These are the most traditional forms of SOPs, outlining a sequence of specific steps to be followed. They are particularly useful for straightforward, routine tasks that require a high degree of accuracy. For example, step-by-step SOPs are common in manufacturing settings for assembling a product or in IT for setting up new hardware or software.

Hierarchical SOPs: These SOPs are structured more like a flowchart and are ideal for processes that involve decision-making. Hierarchical SOPs provide a series of steps, where each step may lead to different subsequent steps based on the scenario. They are frequently used in customer service to guide representatives through various customer inquiries and complaints.

Checklist SOPs: These SOPs are used for tasks that need to be performed regularly and require confirmation that each step has been completed. They are common in quality assurance processes, safety inspections and routine maintenance tasks. For instance, a server maintenance checklist in an IT department ensures that every critical component is checked and accounted for.

Process SOPs: These outline the workflow of a particular process. Rather than focusing on individual tasks, process SOPs provide a high-level view of how various tasks interconnect within a broader process. They are often used for onboarding new employees, where multiple steps and stakeholders are involved over a period of time.

Troubleshooting SOPs: These are designed to guide users through the process of diagnosing and resolving problems. In IT, troubleshooting SOPs are crucial for efficiently handling system outages, software bugs or network issues, providing systematic steps to identify and rectify the problem.

Emergency SOPs: These procedures are critical in outlining steps to be taken in case of an emergency. They are essential in ensuring safety and quick response in situations like data breaches, natural disasters or other crises. Emergency SOPs in IT might include protocols for data recovery, system lockdowns or communication strategies during a security breach.

Each type of SOP serves a unique purpose and is tailored to the specific needs of a business or department. Effectively implementing and managing these SOPs can greatly enhance operational efficiency, reduce errors and ensure a consistent quality of work. Tools like IT Glue can assist in creating, organizing and maintaining these SOPs, making them easily accessible and up-to-date for all team members.

How IT Glue can enhance your SOP process

IT Glue offers innovative solutions that bring a new level of efficiency to your SOP processes. Our documentation platform allows you to create, maintain and access SOPs with ease, ensuring that all team members have the latest information at their fingertips. This not only streamlines the process of creating and updating SOPs but also makes it easier for your team to follow them. With IT Glue, you can reduce the time spent on administrative tasks and focus more on strategic activities that drive business growth. Learn more about our SOP documentation capabilities at IT Glue SOP Documentation.

Implementing SOPs in your business can be transformative. They provide a clear framework for your team, reducing ambiguity and increasing productivity. With IT Glue, creating and managing these procedures becomes seamless. Our platform offers features like version control, customizable templates and easy access to critical information, ensuring your SOPs are always up-to-date and effective.

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Standard operating procedures are the backbone of efficient, reliable business operations. They ensure consistency and quality in your products and services. With IT Glue’s solutions, you can elevate your SOP process, making it more accessible, manageable and effective. Discover how IT Glue can support your business’s standard operating procedures and drive efficiency. For more in-depth insights and features, visit the IT Glue Features page.

Remember, the key to success in any business is not just having SOPs but having the right tools to manage them effectively. IT Glue is here to help you achieve that.

The post What is a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)? Types, Benefits & More appeared first on IT Glue.

In this blog, we’ll discuss the basics of policy management and how you can leverage it to ensure consistency and operational efficiency in your organization.

What is policy management?

Policy management refers to the process of creating, publishing, communicating, implementing and managing various policies in an organization. To manage your policies effectively, you need to establish specific rules and regulations on how policies need to be governed. The framework you create for policy management may cover various aspects, including data privacy, network security, compliance, company best practices and employee conduct.

Since policies provide guidelines for organizational processes, policy management is crucial in facilitating an organization’s decision-making. Also, policy management ensures that employees adhere to established policies and procedures, helping to meet business goals and mitigate unforeseen risks.

What is the main objective of policy management?

The main objective of policy management is to keep business practices consistent throughout the company across all departments. Consistent business practices minimize exposure to risks and ensure that everyone in the company is on the same page. Proper policy management can create a communication system that aligns your organizational goals with your policies.

Poor policy implementation and communication can ruin the reputation of your company. Policy management prevents that from happening by proactively monitoring your system for potential issues.

What is the importance of policy management?

If your policies and procedures don’t align with your business goals, your overall business process could become inefficient, and your team members will face significant challenges in executing their everyday tasks. This could also result in legal complications and compliance issues for your organization.

Imagine a scenario where every department in your organization has created its own policies and procedures. Without a centralized policy management process, these departments may develop policies that conflict with each other. Also, there won’t be any consistency in their tone or framework. By streamlining various policies under a unified platform, you can ensure proper management of your policies without making them chaotic.

What are the steps for effective policy management?

Creating new policies can be a complex process involving writing, editing and reviewing various guidelines. However, policy management is a relatively simple process. Let’s explore some critical steps required to ensure effective policy management.

1. Create a policy management system

The first step in managing policies is to create a system that contains all the policies you’ve created. You can establish a policy management team to monitor the system. Also, make sure you have an administrator to direct the process.

When creating a policy management system, approval from top management is critical. Ensure you have the correct data and statistics to present to your top management regarding policy management. A policy management system approved by the top managers will be easier to implement.

2. Centralize access to your policies

To ensure your employees can access your policies whenever needed, you need to create a centralized repository accessible to everyone. A cloud-based solution you can access from anywhere is ideal for storing and managing your policies. Ensure that the solution has the features to send instant updates and notifications when changes are made to policies.

3. Review your policies proactively

Organizational policies are not set in stone. They must evolve based on the changing needs of the company. For this reason, you must periodically review the validity of your policies and make changes whenever required. For instance, if a new type of security threat has emerged, you must update your security policies to include strategies to mitigate this threat.

4. Plan your policy lifecycle

When creating new policies, you must understand their significance from creation to retirement. Once your policies have served their purpose and are no longer relevant, you must replace them with new ones. For instance, when new technologies are incorporated, you must replace policies related to outdated technologies.

5. Audit to identify policy gaps

Besides reviewing your policies, you also must perform regular audits to ensure smooth policy implementation. Audits can help you identify potential policy gaps and correct them before they affect your company’s objectives. If you need more transparency in your policy management, you can opt for an external audit to ensure objective results.

6. Document all your steps

Documentation plays a crucial role in your policy management process. With proper documentation, you can mitigate risks, demonstrate compliance, train your staff and ensure strict adherence to your policies. Everything from policy modifications to audit reports must be documented in a robust documentation solution to ensure your policy implementation is on track.

What are the benefits of policy management?

Policies provide a high-level guideline for implementing processes and procedures in your organization. With proper policy management, you can direct the entire organization and overcome operational inefficiencies. Let’s check out some of the key benefits of policy management.

Reinforces expectations

Policies establish a unified point of reference on how organizations must operate and what they must do to achieve their business goals. Employees can refer to these policies to understand their responsibilities and the type of work they must deliver to meet organizational standards.

When employees understand their responsibilities clearly, it translates into efficient usage of company resources and higher productivity. Since everyone has clear expectations of their roles, overall waste can be minimized. As a result, organizations can have more time to pursue various creative tasks.

Promotes accountability

Policies and procedures are designed to establish a standard set of guidelines for everyone. For instance, most organizations have a code of conduct highlighting expected behaviors from their employees. The primary reason for this is to promote accountability for employees’ actions.

Policy documents also inform what would happen if anyone failed to follow the established guidelines. Employees must understand their roles and act accordingly.

Without proper policy management, your policies would become chaotic to manage. If different departments have conflicting policies, it creates confusion about what to follow. For this reason, companies focus on creating consistent and coordinated policies through centralized policy management.

Boosts productivity

While policies establish guidelines for organizations, policy management focuses on improving the set policies. You can achieve this by collecting feedback from all stakeholders affected by the policies. Organizations can improve their policies by measuring various performance indicators and ensuring seamless operations.

Since continuous performance enhancement will help boost productivity, organizations can benefit significantly from solid policy management. In addition to increasing productivity, this can improve your customer satisfaction and overall reputation in the market.

Risk management

When employees know their roles and act in alignment with the company’s requirements, it significantly reduces risk. Most companies have internal policies for cybersecurity, which have specific guidelines for mitigating risks. Companies also have policies on how employees should act in case of an unexpected cyberattack.

With solid policy management, you can ensure that your employees successfully follow the risk management guidelines mentioned in the security policies. Moreover, policy management sets guidelines on risk tolerance levels so that organizations can establish the necessary control over various practices.

Compliance support

Policies provide the necessary guidelines on how companies can adhere to various compliance regulations. Policy management ensures that the organization stays within the compliance rules and regulations. Policy management also makes compliance audits a breeze since all policy updates are properly monitored and recorded under a unified platform.

What are policy management best practices?

Since policies play a vital role in enhancing a company’s operational efficiency and security, they must be managed most prudently. However, collaborating with multiple departments, collecting policies and procedures, and updating the guidelines can be overwhelming.

We have put together a list of policy management best practices to streamline the process and ensure effective policy management.

Review policies often

Since policies play a critical role in an organization’s success, you must review them regularly without fail. Policies are prone to changes based on new regulations or evolving business goals. These changes must be updated periodically to ensure proper policy workflow. Reviews help identify and update these gaps before outdated policies start creating issues in your operations.

Provide policy-based training

When training your new or existing employees, make sure the training is based on your organizational policies. This helps your employees contextualize company policies and leverage them whenever required. Policy-based training can also help with your company’s long-term compliance management.

Preserve consistency

Consistency is the cornerstone of any policy management system. Your policies must be consistent across the entire organization to ensure fairness. Be it your terms and conditions or employee disciplinary policies, consistency helps you maintain the same quality throughout the company.

To preserve consistency, you must focus on implementing your policies the right way. Make sure your policies are followed by every department uniformly. If the complexity of policies causes any inconsistencies, revise your policies to simplify them.

Involve stakeholders

Policy management is not a one-person process. All stakeholders who were involved in policy creation must collaborate to ensure seamless policy management. This approach helps you align your policies with your company goals, environment and culture. Most importantly, a team-based approach will make developing, reviewing, revising and retiring your policies and procedures easy.

Use external groups to examine your policies

While internal players are essential in creating and reviewing policies, external groups can provide you with a unique perspective in creating transparent policies. These external players could include industry peers, regulatory authorities, third-party service providers, security experts and legal personnel.

Communicate policies effectively

Once you have created your policies, you must communicate them effectively to all those affected by the policy implementation. You need to create a plan to share your policies with all the appropriate groups in your organization.

While some policies and policy updates can be notified with just emails, other critical policies require elaborate communication modes to ensure everyone understands the policies. For instance, you can create a questionnaire for everyone to answer after reading the policy manual.

Utilize a policy management software

To ensure successful policy management, you need to leverage a robust policy management software that can help you simplify the process. Imagine manually creating and updating policy documents for your entire organization. You may have to deal with multiple versions of paper documents, spreadsheets, etc.

With a policy management software, you can update policies instantly and communicate the changes with all the stakeholders involved. Besides making your policy management seamless, a software tool can also help you ensure consistency in the process.

Document and manage IT Policies with IT Glue

IT Glue is an award-winning IT documentation solution that can centralize your policy documentation and most valued assets, including hardware, software, passwords and SOPs. You can leverage a library of policies and procedures to help you kickstart your IT documentation.

Besides consolidating all your policies in a unified platform, IT Glue can also help you streamline your business processes.

IT Glue’s SOC 2-compliant documentation platform features an immutable audit trail, multifactor authentication and next-generation password management engine, all fully integrated and linked with all your policies and procedures.

To know more about how IT Glue can help with your policy management, get in touch with our specialists.

The post Policy Management: Steps and Best Practices for Managing Policies appeared first on IT Glue.

Data is the lifeblood of modern organizations across the world. Considering its significance in building intelligent organizations, managing and protecting your data is critical. However, this could be challenging since most organizational data resides in different locations — on-premises storage systems, the cloud, SaaS applications or other devices. Managing data from different sources is getting complicated, and this could compromise your clients’ security.

Complete visibility with IT Glue and backup integrations

Most technicians don’t log into their backup solutions daily. Backup is more of a set-and-forget tool that is usually accessed only by administrators. Although, technicians might still need to access backup information occasionally.

With the Unitrends and Datto Continuity integrations in IT Glue, you get total visibility into your hardware assets and their backup details to determine whether they are protected. On top of understanding the backup health of your devices, you also need to understand the backup information of critical SaaS solutions you support, including Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.

The new Datto SaaS and Spanning Backup integrations enable you to holistically understand the status of your protected assets and users with ease.

Ensure business continuity with Datto SaaS Protection

This new integration helps you auto-document Datto SaaS Protection information for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace services directly in IT Glue. Since your backup details reside right next to your IT documentation, you can easily determine which environments are protected or not.

You can view all your managed environments’ Datto SaaS Protection backup information in a single pane, including backup status, health, coverage and sync status. Without going into your backup tool, you get to know the exact backup status of all your managed environments, giving you complete peace of mind.

On a per-managed environment level, you can view details such as Protected Seats per application and Backup Health. On a global level, you can see the backup status of all managed environments. These details provide a holistic view into your organization’s backup status.

You’ll also see the Datto SaaS Protection Backup Percentage (in the last 24 hours) across all your managed environments, or per environment, giving you the granularity you need to manage your environments holistically.

Visit this Knowledge Base article for a step-by-step guide on how to set up the Datto SaaS Protection integration.

Complete Contact backup documentation with Spanning

With the new enhancement to the Spanning Backup integration, you can see both your Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace backup information in IT Glue, giving you a complete view into your user protection status.

With Spanning for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace integration in IT Glue, you can view your Mail, Calendar, Contacts and Drive backup details alongside the rest of your Contact information already in IT Glue. You can easily determine the user protection status for both Google and Microsoft solutions, along with other backup details like the last backup time, status, total protected asset size and asset backup time in IT Glue.

Visit this Knowledge Base article for more information on the Spanning Backup integration.

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In this blog, we’ll explore the 10 key steps involved in writing process documentation.

How to write a process document in 10 steps

As business organizations grow, tasks inevitably get more and more complex. With plenty of moving parts in each task, you must keep track of everything from start to end. Without process documentation, everyone will likely follow their own steps, which may lead to massive inefficiency and chaos.

To overcome these challenges, you must learn how to write process documents effectively. Make sure you use these 10 key steps to create process documents correctly.

1. Identify the process

The first step in process documentation is identifying what you should document. This section answers the “why” part of process documentation. In this stage, you must determine the purpose of the process in question and how it contributes to your organization’s goals.

For instance, you can ask questions like:

• Is this a training guide for onboarding newcomers?
• Can this help employees reduce their time spent searching for information?
• Can this be used as a report for senior management?
• Will this process help in making tasks more efficient?
• How will this process benefit the company?

If you have multiple objectives, note them and prioritize them to determine which process you should document first.

2. Determine the scope

The scope of a process defines what will be delivered through the completed process. It outlines various things, such as objectives, estimated timeline for completion, priorities within the process, stakeholder responsibilities, etc. By defining these factors, you can prevent your team from information overload and focus more specifically on the process you are documenting.

Here’s how you can determine the scope of a process:

• Objectives: Estimate the overall objectives you are trying to achieve with the process.
• Timeline: Identify the estimated timeframe it requires to complete the process.
• Stakeholders: Determine the list of stakeholders involved in the process. If you are unsure about the exact stakeholders, identify the teams working on it.
• Priorities: Determine the process priority compared to other processes in the pipeline.
• Resources: Identify the resources required to complete the process within the estimated deadline.

Once you have determined all these factors, you can view your process better and its overall outcome.

3. Determine process boundaries

This step involves identifying where the process begins, where it ends and the people involved. To establish the right boundaries, you need to outline what constitutes the beginning of a process and what constitutes its end.

For instance, let’s say you are trying to make your employee onboarding process efficient through process automation. Here, your boundaries might include finalizing the list of documentation materials for new employees and determining the right person to perform the onboarding.

During this step, you should also establish other metrics, like due dates for completion of each boundary step, key performance indicators, budget required, resources involved, etc. Clearly defined boundaries will help your team understand the limitations in the process and proactively act within these limitations.

4. Identify process inputs and outputs

This stage of process documentation focuses on what you need to complete the process successfully. Input refers to the resources required to complete the process and output refers to what is expected after the completion of the process.

Here is an example of how this works:

Process: Data backup analysis

Input: Types of data stored, storage locations, storage types, etc.

Output: A complete report on current backup health, data recovery time, security details, etc.

Identifying the inputs and outputs is crucial for successfully performing all the other steps in a process. With this information, you can break down your significant goals into smaller steps and allocate sufficient resources at each stage.

5. Organize process steps

Once you have gathered all the required input and output information, it is time to organize them into manageable steps. Here, you need to identify what triggers a particular step in a process. In other words, you must determine which step to complete for another one to begin.

If your process steps are not sequential, you must evaluate other factors, like priorities, due dates, etc., to determine the exact steps.

When dealing with multiple process steps, it is always better to have a brainstorming session with all the required stakeholders. During this session, ensure you include all those directly responsible for executing the process steps. After organizing your process steps, you can focus on assigning the roles to individual stakeholders.

6. Define process roles

This step focuses on describing the people involved in completing the process steps. You must assign roles for the individual stakeholders responsible for completing each step. When recording that in your process document, include their job titles and their names.

When defining process roles, you can include details like what needs to be delivered and their due dates. By doing that, you can ensure seamless completion of each process step before it moves on to the next one.

If the processes are too complex, you may also have to meet with the individual stakeholders directly and gather their input on the process deliverables. This prevents any last-minute surprises or any deviation from individual responsibilities.

7. Visualize the process

One crucial step in process documentation is the visual representation of the entire process. Research shows that adding visuals to documentation is the most effective communication since most people are visual learners. You can add visuals to ensure better clarity, easy communication and adequate information retention.

A flowchart is a simple way of visualizing a complicated process. A step-by-step workflow diagram will bring more clarity to the documentation and make information easily digestible.

Here is an example of a process (antivirus installation) in a visual flowchart:

To create a flowchart of your process, start with the input and add the details of all the steps involved in completing the process. For every step, add the individual stakeholders responsible for its completion, along with the timeline. The flowchart should end with the output, which is the desired outcome of the process.

8. Document process flow exceptions

A process may not follow the documented path on every occasion. Process flows are likely to change depending on different situations. In such instances, you need to note down these exceptions to avoid any confusion in the future.

Let’s consider the above flowchart, for example. If you already have a partnership with an antivirus solutions provider, you don’t have to explore other antivirus products in the market. So, you can skip that step and go directly to the procurement part. Similarly, you can also automate the patching process so that updates are automatically installed whenever available. You can skip the “check for updates” and “download updates” steps here.

All you have to know is that a process may not follow your set path. In some cases, skipping or adding a step might require approval from top executives. When you have these exceptions documented, you can clearly understand how to proceed with them.

9. Set process controls

Besides exceptions, your process might also run into unexpected risks during its execution. You may have to set specific control points to adjust the process to the desired outcome and prevent these risks from completely ruining your process.

The main purpose of these process controls is to make the outcome predictable no matter how many times these processes are repeated. Process controls can either be simple or complex based on the number of process steps and the complexity of other parameters.

In case of complex issues, you must take extra care to reduce the margin of error and deliver the desired output.

10. Publish the document and test the process

Once you have clearly documented the processes, you must review the documentation and test the process as the final step. This is where you ensure that your process is working as it should.

During this stage, you can track the performance of the process and identify any issues that may arise during its execution. For minor issues, you can make corrections in real-time and document these corrections. For complex issues, you may have to rework a particular step and develop the required solution.

Testing is not a one-and-done activity. You must perform multiple iterations of testing and ensure you achieve optimal results every time. Based on the feedback you receive in this testing stage, you can refine and update your process documentation with better information.

Streamline process documentation writing with IT Glue

IT Glue is an award-winning documentation solution that allows you to centralize your process documentation alongside your hardware assets, software assets, passwords and SOPs. This helps you streamline all business processes, like resolving tickets, building client relationships and managing projects, as efficiently as possible.

IT Glue has out-of-the-box checklists and ITIL SOP templates that allow you to kickstart your process enhancements immediately. IT Glue’s SOC 2-compliant documentation platform features an immutable audit trail, multifactor authentication and next-generation password management engine, all fully integrated and linked with all your process documentation.

To learn more about how IT Glue can help improve process documentation,

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In this blog, we’ll explore the significance of SOPs and how they can be used to overcome business obstacles.

What is an SOP document?

A standard operating procedure (SOP) refers to a written document that contains step-by-step instructions on how to perform certain processes. When there are no documented processes, employees tend to do things their own way, resulting in process inconsistency and leaving a lot of room for error.

SOPs bring standardization to complex tasks so that they remain consistent and error-free across the organization. For instance, regulatory demands are so complex in today’s world where security is the utmost priority. Meeting these demands consistently without SOP documentation is extremely difficult.

What are the goals of establishing SOPs?

The main goal of SOP documentation is to ensure organizational consistency in all processes and outcomes. By ensuring consistent outcomes, organizations can boost efficiency, adhere to regulatory demands, resolve issues, increase profits and more.

Organizations also establish SOPs for the following reasons:

• Business continuity: Businesses cannot afford to stop for any reason. The easy availability of standardized information ensures business continuity even if an employee departs or goes on vacation.
• Employee onboarding/offboarding: Standardized processes are vital when onboarding or offboarding an employee. SOPs can help establish them and bring more reliability to the process.
• Compliance adherence: Compliance regulations demand that critical processes are documented and periodically reviewed. This provides additional security to the company and prevents compliance penalties.
• Knowledge retention: When employees leave an organization, they take the acquired knowledge along with them. With standardized SOPs, you can retain this knowledge and ensure proper knowledge management.
• Higher quality:  When people work on complicated tasks without knowing how to work, it leads to inconsistency and errors. With SOPs, information is readily available on how to perform tasks. This reduces errors in the process and improves quality.

Why are SOPs important?

An organization should be prepared to deal with all kinds of eventualities. They cannot do so without writing down their institutional knowledge. Companies should define everything including what they are doing, how they are doing it, who is supposed to be working on what, etc. Without documenting their critical processes, companies cannot grow their business in the desired way.

Here’s a list of consequences that are bound to happen without SOPs:

• Halt in operations: Although employees may come and go, your institutional knowledge should not change along with changes in your workforce. Without documentation, a company’s operations risk coming to a stop when key employees leave.
• Irrecoverable losses: From natural disasters to cyberattacks, tragedies may strike a business at any moment. SOPs have disaster recovery plans, standardized guidelines, business continuity information, etc., to ensure quick recovery from a disaster. Companies that don’t document any of these items will find it extremely difficult to recover.
• Lack of growth: Organizations innovate by documenting their growth at every step. Without documentation, they have to spend all their time and resources reinventing the wheel. Ultimately, this will compromise their growth.

What are the three types of SOP formats?

While there are no hard and fast rules preventing you from developing your own internal SOP document, there are three types of SOP documents that can make life easy for you. Most organizations choose one of the following types:

Step-by-step SOP

As the name implies, a step-by-step SOP breaks down a task or a process into a list of different steps with detailed instructions for each step. The steps detailed in the SOP should be simple and clear enough for anyone to follow.

Hierarchical SOP

The hierarchical SOP is similar to the step-by-step format but more detailed. It uses a top-down approach and breaks down complicated tasks into a list of steps. However, each step contains many more additional details as required by the task. In a step-by-step SOP, you can list out steps as 1, 2, 3, etc. In the hierarchical model, the steps contain additional steps, such as 1a, 1b, 1c, etc., depending on the complexity of the task.

This is mainly used for complicated tasks where detailed instructions are required to complete them successfully.

Flowchart SOP

When your process needs a visual representation, it is better to use the flowchart SOP. The format is usually adopted when there are multiple outcomes in a process. You can assign conditional logic to illustrate different outcomes and organize your procedures accordingly.

What should an SOP document contain?

Considering the main goal of SOP documentation is to ensure consistency, it is important to develop a specific format with all the key elements. However, there are no rigid rules on what format to use and an organization may adjust these elements as per their requirements.

Proper SOP documentation should likely address each of the following in one way or another.

Title page

It is always better to start your SOP document with a title page. This should contain the following information about the document:

• Title of the task or process
• An identification number for your SOP
• Date of creation and revision
• Division or branch of the organization applicable to the SOP
• Name of the creator with approval signatures from relevant stakeholders

Table of contents

This can be skipped if your document is only a few pages long. For long documents, you must include a table of contents to locate relevant information easily.

Preliminary information

Before you go about describing the entire process, you must include some preliminary information that covers the scope and purpose of your SOP. You can convey it by including the following details:

• Purpose & goal: There must be a reason behind creating an SOP document. By defining the purpose and goal of the document, you are providing a high-level overview of the process you are discussing in the document.
• Roles and responsibilities: This section provides straightforward information about all the stakeholders involved in the process. You can also use this section to define the specific roles of the individuals involved.
• Related documents: In this section, you define the documents related to the SOP for some additional information. This directs users to the right documentation if they need more information about a specific process or task.
• Resources: The successful completion of any task or process requires a variety of tools, technology and resources. By documenting this information, you can swiftly gather the materials required and get to work right away.
• Safety information: The SOP document should also include all the cautionary information about the use of resources and the steps involved in a process. All safety information must be provided clearly in simple language. You also need to mention who to contact if additional safety information is required.

Procedures

Once you have documented all the preliminary information, you must outline the procedures involved in completing the process. This is probably the most important part of your SOP document since it provides vital information on the actual steps to be followed in completing a task. You can use sequential steps to describe the procedures with additional sub-steps when required.

Since this is the critical part of your SOP documentation, you need to make it as clear and detailed as possible. Some SOP documents even include diagrams and decision trees to illustrate the procedures clearly. The end user who reads the document must be able to grasp it quickly without much back and forth in clearing doubts.

Quality assurance

This section concerns how your team members are performing with respect to the SOP document. You can do this on a case-by-case basis and see if your employees are adhering to the procedures mentioned in the SOP document. If you see any issues in the way things are done, you must rectify the issues and make the necessary adjustments going forward.

References and definitions

There should also be a section with references to all the source documents from which information is collected for this SOP document. Additionally, you can also create a glossary section with definitions of all important terms.

Revision history

Finally, it is better to include a revision history with information about all the revisions made to the SOP document. This should include details such as who has made the revision, when it was made, why was it made, etc. You can see the different versions of the SOP document here and revert to an older version if required.

What are the benefits of SOP documentation?

SOPs can benefit any organization irrespective of its size. It helps companies stay organized, saves time and ensures the easy accomplishment of key tasks. Let’s look at some of the major benefits of SOP documentation.

Promotes consistency and reduces errors

The most important benefit of SOP documentation is its ability to ensure consistency in the process and minimize human errors. Since the processes are clearly outlined in a step-by-step manner, it removes guesswork from your tasks. As a result, all task outcomes remain consistent and error-free.

Aids in onboarding and employee training

SOP documents are also developed for training and onboarding new employees. This helps ensure that all your new hires get the same level of training for the same amount of time.

Boosts safety

In organizations where employees work in hazardous situations, SOPs can be created to establish workplace guidelines on employee safety. Organizations can also use similar best practices to follow cybersecurity hygiene and meet compliance demands.

Preserves organizational knowledge

A report by Bridge Group has estimated that the average tenure of an employee in an organization has fallen to 1.8 years in 2021. If you have created SOPs and documented all key processes, you don’t have to worry about losing your institutional knowledge when an employee leaves.

Supports compliance

Companies that fail to adhere to relevant compliance laws often end up paying huge fines and penalties. This can be avoided by creating SOPs with the exact procedures to be followed.

Who is responsible for writing SOPs?

Depending on the industry you operate in and the department for which the SOP is being created, there may be different people responsible for creating the SOPs. For instance, process engineers take up the role of SOP creation in manufacturing companies. Similarly, for SOP documentation concerning cybersecurity, IT managers or security consultants may do the writing tasks.

Irrespective of who writes the SOP document, it is better to get inputs from stakeholders in different areas. Also, the SOP document must be reviewed by all concerned stakeholders once the creation process is done.

What are SOP templates?

Organizations can use SOP templates to standardize their procedures. When you have standardized templates across the whole organization, you can get started with your SOPs quickly without worrying about fonts, margins, outlines and other trivial things. You can either create your own SOP templates or use the common ones available online.

SOP documentation with IT Glue

IT Glue is a robust documentation platform with powerful features. IT Glue enables documentation of SOPs alongside your key IT infrastructure information, including passwords, assets, licenses, etc., so everything is contextual and a click away. You can also have access to a library of pre-built SOP templates, many of which are based on ITIL and industry best practices. With these out-of-the-box templates, you can start documenting right away.

IT Glue’s SOC 2-compliant documentation platform features an immutable audit trail, multifactor authentication and next-generation password management engine. You can also integrate these features with your SOP documentation.

To learn more about how IT Glue can help with your SOP documentation, request a demo.

Get your demo here!

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In this blog, we’ll discuss the different aspects of software documentation and how you can make the most out of it to benefit your organization.

What Is Software Documentation?

Software documentation refers to any writings, video messages or images that typically accompany a software product. It exists mainly to help users understand the product, interface, capability, benefits and more. Most importantly, it also answers significant questions that may arise when using the product.

Why do we need software documentation?

Documentation is an integral part of any software development process. During software development, developers usually write down everything including API documentation, release notes, build notes and other instructions. These documents play a critical role in the maintenance stage of the software development life cycle.

Without proper documentation, future developers who work on a software product will have a tough time understanding its information architecture, user experience and more. When the information is hard to locate, your support team will have a tough time assisting your customers. In short, proper documentation could be the difference between success and failure in achieving your communication goals.

What should software documentation include?

The documentation you create should achieve these goals – facilitate understanding for end-users, assist the support team and consumers in finding relevant information, and resolve issues that may be encountered during the software development process. Based on these goals, you need to document everything relevant to your software.

For instance, if a module in a software product needs to be extended, its existing model and architecture need to be understood by the developer in detail. Similarly, identifying common bugs and causes is essential to ensure faster resolution of issues. Your software documentation should include all this information in detail so that it is easily understood by future stakeholders.

What Are the Different Types of Software Documentation?

There are several types of software documentation available depending upon the target audience they are created for. They all perform a critical role during the software development life cycle. For our understanding, let’s focus on the four main types of documentation associated with the software development process.

Requirements Documentation

This is typically done at the beginning of the software development process. This outlines the expectations behind the development of the software product including what it does, what goals it serves, which environment is ideal for its operation, etc. It also focuses on the functional requirements, compatibility requirements, limitations, configurations, hardware requirements, software requirements and more.

Architecture Documentation

This document outlines the high-level architecture of the software being developed. This mostly concerns the design element of the software development process. It provides information about the components in the software, their roles, their functionalities and the data flows among various components. Since it is associated with design, this documentation doesn’t have much code.

Technical Documentation

This concerns all the technical details of software development. It is mainly intended for a technical audience like software developers. This usually includes API documentation, release notes, a high-level overview of the software and system documentation. The quality of technical documentation is extremely important in any software development. Any errors in documentation may lead to inadequate solutions that don’t meet the expectations of stakeholders.

User Documentation

This documentation is intended for the end-users who actually use the software product. Since this is created for non-technical people, it should be simple and detailed. Some of the examples include how-to guides, tutorials, user manuals, reference docs, configuration guides, etc.

Software Documentation Best Practices

The purpose of any documentation is to transfer knowledge. Since the success of a software product requires comprehension of its usage, software documentation can make or break a product. To ensure you document everything the right way, you need to follow these best practices.

• Prioritize Documentation: Documentation should not be just an afterthought in any software development process. You need to actively prioritize documentation to save your valuable time and effort. When you document correctly, you don’t have to remember every little detail and you can eliminate errors in the process.
• Know Your Audience: Focusing on your audience is the best way to document everything. For instance, your technical documentation intended for developers can have complex terms and jargon. However, this should not be the case for user documentation. You need to create documentation based on the audience you are trying to appeal to.
• Create a Content Strategy: Documentation is not a one-off approach. It is a continuous process that follows the evolution of a software product. You need to create a content strategy to appeal to your target audience. Think about the types of content you can create and think about the delivery methods to reach your target audience.
• Use the Agile Approach: An agile approach offers a lot of benefits for software documentation. Many firms already use agile subsets like Just in Time documentation, Docs Like Code, etc., to ensure collaboration among all stakeholders. This also provides you with better control over document versions and sources.
• Work With Experts: When creating technical documentation, you need the expertise of developers to come up with the right documentation. Make sure you have a way to ensure collaboration between experts and other stakeholders.
• Use the Right Documentation Tool: Manual documentation is not only tedious but also allows room for lots of errors. You need a powerful documentation tool that automates the documentation process and boosts efficiency. You can try tools like IT Glue to easily create all the required documentation and share it with the concerned stakeholders.
• Incorporate Customer Feedback: When you create documentation for end-users, your customers’ feedback becomes critical in understanding their concerns and difficulties. You need to collect customer feedback and figure out a way to incorporate it into your development process.

What to Look for in a Software Documentation Tool

Manual documentation is a time-consuming process and takes a lot of effort. To ensure optimal use of your resources, you need a documentation tool that can automate the process and bring structure to your documentation infrastructure. Some of the key features to look for in a software documentation tool include the following.

• Structured Organization: The info you enter into your documentation tool should be automatically structured. By using a common framework, you can organize information effectively and ensure instant retrieval.
• Secure Access: Multiple people in your organization are likely to use your documentation tool. Your software needs to provide secure access to everyone without compromising security.
• Password Management: There should be a fully integrated password engine linked with all your documentation. This ensures the effective retrieval of user passwords.
• Relationship Mapping: This feature brings related items together and ensures easy access to all relevant information at your fingertips. When related items are grouped together, you don’t have to search for them when performing a complex task.
• Integration: Your documentation software needs to be easily integrated with other major platforms and third-party applications. This is an essential feature when you are working with multiple disparate tools.
• Enterprise-Grade Security: Security is a major requirement in this age of rising cyberthreats and ransomware. When your documentation tool is loaded with security features like access control, password vault, multifactor authentication, etc., you can rest assured that your information is always safe.

Software Documentation With IT Glue

IT Glue is a leading, cloud-based documentation platform that can document your most valued assets into knowledge and information. The knowledge you and your team gather in your everyday tasks can be easily consolidated and related to hardware and software information. This means everything can be accessed from a single pane of glass, putting everything at your fingertips.

IT Glue’s SOC 2-compliant documentation platform features an immutable audit trail, multifactor authentication and next-generation password management engine, all of which are fully integrated and linked with all your documentation.

To know more about how IT Glue can help with software documentation, request a demo!

Request a Demo Here!

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There are a lot of reasons why there is value in creating process diagrams. Some processes are just easier to visualize. For some people, a wall of text is impenetrable, but a diagram is crystal clear. Whatever the reason, we know that some things just make more sense when rendered visually.

What you need to know about great process diagrams

• There are many diagram shapes. Familiarize yourself with them, and use the right one at the right time.
• Use symbols to denote different types of steps. The ASME symbols, designed by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, can be used. Choose whatever symbols work best, but be consistent in which one you use.
• Determine the scope and objective of the process ahead of time.
• Brainstorm the different steps ahead of time. A process diagram is not usually something you bang out quickly – it has to be thought through thoroughly.
• Break each process into steps. Include each step on the diagram. Skipping steps leads to confusion.
• Show connections, sequences, and decisions.
• Show the entire process from beginning to the end.
• Use the right tool for the job. IT Glue is integrated with Lucidchart, and that one is cost-effective. But there’s nothing wrong with Visio, Draw.io, Google Drawing, Gliffy, Highcharts…there are a lot of tools out there that can be used to assist with creating great process diagrams.

A series of logical steps

You can see that even a simple task has a number of different steps. But understanding each step, and ensuring that they are done correctly, in the right sequence, is the key to achieving repeatable high service levels. Your techs can see each step of every process that they follow, and in doing so are better equipped to deliver a high level of performance, every time.

You can even render the steps in an animated GIF to make the process crystal clear.

For more information on embedding diagrams and charts into IT Glue, check out our handy Knowledge Base, including our article on working with images in SOPs and our Lucidchart-specific article. 

IT Glue is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that tackles one of the most pressing issues for IT service providers: team efficiency. Our documentation platform helps companies to document their business assets and processes, allowing for consistent process improvements, dramatic waste reduction, and improvement of their bottom lines. Once stored in IT Glue, they become a company asset, rather than a department or individual one, and staff can self-serve. This creates an organization poised for growth, and free of the risks/costs associated with missing information. 

The post Documentation How To: Creating Great Process Diagrams appeared first on IT Glue.

IT Glue

All is going well until you notice a pothole. Then another. And you realize that you’re documenting processes, but some of them don’t make sense except to the person who wrote them. Don’t worry. This can be fixed. There’s a process to documenting processes.

If your team is having trouble creating quality process documentation, that’s normal. There’s a reason technical writing is a profession unto itself. However, the basics of process writing are pretty easy to understand, and just implementing the fundamentals should improve the quality of your process documentation almost immediately.

Go start to finish

It may seem obvious, but sometimes people don’t do this. When documenting a process, describe it from the very beginning of the process to the very end. It might also help to draw a line chart to conceptualize the steps.

Brief introduction

Provide only the critical information about the process in the introduction. Avoid lengthy preambles. Just state what the process is for, what the end objective of the process is and how many steps there are. If you have to differentiate the process from a similar process, be as brief and direct with that messaging as possible.

Use sequencers

All processes are a series of steps. Break down the process into these steps. Write the process in terms of the sequence of steps. Use numbers, bullets or phrases such as “first of all”, “next” and “finally”. This tells the reader that you have moved on to the next step.

Each action should be associated with a single point in the sequence. Each action should follow the previous action, and precede the following action. Do not skip steps — write even the obvious ones.

Less is more

Describe all of the elements of the process, but nothing more. A process document should not contain editorializing, or asides. Be sparse in your writing and keep it simple.

Be careful with contingencies

Contingencies should be given their own sentences, located after the previous step. They should be written as ‘if x, then y”. Avoid long-winded contingencies. Each “if-then” sequence is its own step.

Avoid passive voice

The process document is a “how to”, so write it like you were giving instructions to somebody.  Be as direct as possible.

Use visuals

Visuals can and should be used to lend clarity to process documents. Screenshots are a great tool for ensuring clarity. A good example of incorporating screenshots into a process document can be found here in our Knowledge Base. For more complicated processes, a process diagram is often valuable to help people visualize the pathway. We have a blog post with tips on creating process diagrams. 

IT Glue is a documentation platform that helps you to streamline your processes, record and organize information, and reduce the amount of time your techs waste looking for information. IT Glue’s partners report efficiency gains almost immediately after launching the platform. Watch the demo to find out more.

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What is process documentation?

As the name suggests, this entails establishing and explaining the steps of a routine task or project. A seemingly obvious piece of advice, but the one that often goes by the wayside, and isn’t done using tools and features that make process documentation work for you.

IT Glue is perfect for documenting IT environments, and likewise many of it’s integrations and native features lend themselves well to process documentation. Here are just a few:

IT Glue Checklists:  Checklists are not new, but they’ll never fall out of fashion. Our checklists let you establish templates for routine tasks, such as onboarding a new client, or setting up a new workstation, and even sends notifications when items in a checklist are assigned to team members.

IT Glue Documents: Part of IT Glue’s core assets, Documents is the perfect place for Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), troubleshooting guides or even internal policy manuals.

Office Cloud Editor: IT Glue’s integration with Office 365 is unique. This integration lets you open, edit and save Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents right within the IT Glue interface. This means you don’t have to toggle back and forth between applications, and documents can be saved and related to specific clients, servers, workstations, or wherever it makes the most sense. Co-authoring is even possible through this integration.

Word of advice: File naming conventions are everything. If your file names are inconsistent searching for documents will take twice as long. Use file names that are intuitive, and use abbreviations so they’re more concise.

Scenario 1: Family Emergency

Your Lead Technician’s dog is going into labor and has to unexpectedly go on leave. This seasoned employee is your go-to person for nearly everything—familiar with every nook and cranny of the business. It just so happens that on this day, you’re also onboarding a whale of a client, including an onsite visit to reconfigure portions of the IT environment and ensure the entire network is accurately documented. You send out your only alternative: the new hire. Luckily, there’s an IT Glue checklist that includes all the items that need to be checked for the first in person meeting, including forms that need to be filled out, the key points of contact they need to shake hands with, and which new applications need to be gone over. Reconfiguring to optimize how the network operates follows best practices established within your company, which are laid out in an SOP, and as a back up, the junior tech can reference how other clients have been set up in IT Glue, using the IT Glue mobile app.

Scenario 2: Application Pivot

Imagine that you’ve heavily used Office 365 to store client information in the past, but it’s gotten to the point where using a documentation platform is necessary to keep everything organized and accessible. In various word documents and spreadsheets there are invoices, past communications, SOPs, troubleshooting how to’s, contact information, or even just notes about their network configuration. You don’t want to transfer all this information over to IT Glue since much of it is out of date, and you’ve used Network Glue to automatically discover, document and diagram their IT environment, but also don’t want to leave it hanging. Through the IT Glue integration with Office 365, you can store these documents right within your IT Glue documentation, ensuring that if you ever need to reference this information, or even if you see the value in keeping it up to date, you can do so within the IT Glue app. The transition from one way of working to the next is streamlined and nothing will fall through the cracks.

IT Glue is an award-winning documentation platform used by over 150,000 individuals in 50+ countries. It brings together all of your IT information, striking a perfect balance between structured and flexibility. It’s a must-have for any IT professional.

Yes, I’d like a demo!

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