How to Write SOPs Your Team Will Actually Use
Why most documentation gets ignored—and how to fix it
If you’ve ever written a process doc, you’ve probably seen this happen:
You spend hours crafting it.
You send it out.
Silence.
A week later, someone pings you with a question you literally answered on page one.
I’ve been there—managing product maturity across 17 projects in a large risk and technology department, building governance frameworks with cross-functional teams, and making sure we were ready for audits. And I learned quickly: documentation only works if people actually read it.
So why don’t they?
Why Most SOPs Fail
Here’s what I’ve seen set a document up for failure:
Too long and too dense: Teams are busy. If your doc reads like a policy textbook, it won’t get read.
Buried or lost: If it lives deep in a wiki no one visits, it’s as good as gone.
Unclear purpose or next step: If readers can’t immediately tell what to do with the doc, they’ll close it and move on.
The worst part? You could’ve had a real impact—saved hours, avoided rework, reduced compliance risk—but the doc didn’t land.
3 Principles for Better Documentation
After managing over 30+ regulatory and technology projects, here’s what’s worked for me to make documentation stick:
Write for action, not admiration: Don’t aim to sound smart. Aim to make someone else’s job easier. That could mean short sentences, clear headers, and visible takeaways.
Make it findable and visible: We used Confluence and SharePoint, but even great docs got lost. Visibility = usage.
Design for your reader: It was less “how I would explain it” and more “how they needed to see it.”
How I Structure Docs That Get Used
Here’s the template I now use for SOPs, governance guides, or process playbooks:
Summary (2-3 lines): What is this and why does it matter?
What You Need to Know: Key rules, steps, or principles—ideally with visuals.
Who’s Responsible: Clear owners and contacts.
When It Applies: Situations and triggers.
Link to Tools or Templates: Don’t make people search.
Version Control / Date Updated: Signals the doc is alive, not a relic.
Bonus tip: Use Power BI or automation tools (like Power Automate) to track usage or flag outdated content.
Quick Checklist:
✅ One-pager or a clear index if it’s long
✅ Purpose and outcome are obvious in the first screen
✅ Easy to scan—think bullets, bold text, and section headers
✅ Linked everywhere relevant
✅ Actually tested by someone other than the author
