What is a standard operating procedure?
A standard operating procedure is the document that states how a task is to be carried out and by whom. In a regulated setting it is a controlled document with a named owner and a recorded revision history. For a training programme it is the source material, since a module has to teach the procedure as approved rather than as practised.
Also called: SOP
Why the approved procedure is accurate and insufficient
An SOP describes what should happen, and the distance between that and what happens on the floor is the reason training exists at all. Teams generating modules from procedures meet this immediately, because the document is written for an assessor rather than for the person doing the task, so it states the control and omits the judgement that makes the control workable. A module reproducing the document faithfully will be accurate and useless. Extraction has to keep the procedural obligation intact while adding the context the document never needed.
- The SOP is the controlled text an auditor compares the training against.
- Procedures carry a revision history, which gives a module something stable to pin to.
- Obligations in a procedure have to survive into the module word for word.
- Judgement and context are absent from the document and have to come from elsewhere.
How a standard operating procedure works
- The procedure is retrieved from the controlled repository at a named revision.
- Steps and decision points are extracted as discrete objectives, each with a responsible role.
- Clauses stating an obligation are carried through without paraphrase.
- A subject expert supplies the worked context the document leaves implicit.
- Assessment items are written against the decision points rather than the step list.
- The module records the procedure identifier and the revision it came from.
How a standard operating procedure is evaluated
A module generated from a procedure is assessed against the procedure itself rather than against an objective someone wrote afterwards. Test the following for each module before release:
- coverage of procedural steps present in the approved revision
- fidelity of obligation wording against the source clause
- share of decision points with a matched assessment item
- subject expert acceptance on first review
- divergence between the procedure and observed practice on the floor
Limitations, risks and common failure modes
- Procedures are approved years apart, so one module teaches against obsolete text.
- Local practice has diverged and the module teaches a procedure nobody follows.
- Steps written as a single dense clause defeat decomposition into objectives.
- The repository holds several documents each claiming to be the current procedure.