or "How To Organize A One Week Client Project As Project Manager SOP". It is now week 11 and two weeks ago I already had the opportunity to slip into the role of project manager. For my reflection log, I started to summarise my experiences during this time in the form of bullet points. Fortunately, I suddenly remembered my intensive experiences with SOPs a few years ago. I hadn't thought about that for a long time.
What are SOPs?
When I think about it, one of the most valuable lessons I learnt was the critical importance of documenting, implementing and maintaining transparent processes, commonly known as Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), which originate from clinical research and practice.
Lessons from my Bachelor of Laws as working student
During my studies, I learnt in detail how to write and implement transparent process management and the development of SOPs. These structured documents serve to ensure consistency, efficiency and clarity in daily operations. The introduction of SOPs provides a clear roadmap for staff to follow, reducing the potential for errors and misunderstandings. What I particularly liked about SOPs is that they facilitate training by providing new employees with detailed instructions on their tasks, thus shortening the learning curve. They also help with quality control by establishing standard procedures.
As well as studying the theoretical aspects of process management, I also applied these principles in my bachelor's thesis. As a working student, I had the opportunity to deal with the practical application of SOPs for 4 months. I conducted standardised interviews with employees from various departments in order to subsequently create suitable SOPs. Standardised interviews are also an advantage when the processes are recorded by people from outside the department. Otherwise it is sometimes difficult to record things that are taken for granted.
One of the most important insights from my academic experience was the realisation that SOPs are not static documents. They need to evolve with the organisation and adapt to new challenges and innovations. This dynamic requires regular reviews and updates to ensure that procedures remain relevant and effective. And that's what makes them so beautiful, because they become a good record of how internal processes evolve over time. Sometimes processes no longer work because the team or customers change, and then you can go back one or two "versions" of the SOP, for example, and easily reintegrate older processes because they have already proven themselves (e.g. version control).
Now as as a Data School Consultant
I know how I feel about my experience as a project manager. I have reviewed my bullet points on this. But how helpful are these notes to my colleagues compared to an SOP visualisation? That's what interested me. That's why I visualised this process (see SOPs below).
Graphical Visualisation of SOPs
The graphical representation of SOPs can significantly improve their clarity and usability. At the time, I only knew PowerPoint as a possible visualisation tool. After some research, I realised that there are now various tools that can be used to present SOPs in a structured way. The clear thing about SOPs is that there is the same structure of symbols for the same actions within processes. This makes the SOPS easy to read.
The basis for the symbols I use is BPMN (see www.zenkit.com for example), a globally recognised standard. BPMN offers a uniform and generally understandable notation for process modelling. However, there are also other standards for the creation of SOPS.
All in all, it was fun to create SOPs again after I had forgotten about this powerful tool for almost 10 years!
Please have a look at my result:
