Anthrobytes Media, LLC

In a previous post, I covered the basics of good procedures. As you recall, standard operating procedures tell people how to do stuff—often the tasks they need to accomplish in your products. Accomplishing these tasks is why the customer purchased your product. Using your product is called stickiness (how frequently the customer is in the product to do the things) and leads to recurring revenue.

So this is important stuff. Providing good procedures is tied to income-generating activities that keep us all employed. Additionally, poor procedures can result in an increase in support costs because customers can’t figure out how to do the needful. Increased support costs are going to kill you in product-led growth. You want the customer who isn’t paying yet to get value without having to contact you.

This article provides tips for technical content creation that you can use today to improve your standard operating procedures. Feel free to use this standard operating procedure template for your own procedures.

The point to a procedure

The reason people need a procedure is to walk through the steps to accomplish 1 specific task in your product. This is a really important point, so consider being with that for a moment.

The reader has a goal (request my time off for next month) and they don’t know how to do that in your Human Resources staffing product, for example. The goal is not to use the HR product—it’s to get their request for time off logged in the system and sent on its way to approval.

Task paths

With the goal of the task in mind, you’re ready to start thinking about the task path through the system to get to that goal. You could start here:

1. Using your company username and password, go to [pretendURLlinkhere] and log into the BlobBlob system.
2. From the menu on the left, click Request time off.

Let’s stop here for a moment. What’s we’ve done is help the reader get logged in with their company log in information. They may not have known they needed that information, so we put it first in the sentence, making it harder to miss. And we provide the URL for the system because they may not have it handy—perhaps it’s the first time they’ve wanted to request time off.

We gave them the critical basic information they need to start down this task path.

Next, we orient the reader (From the menu on the left) and then tell them what to click to go to the page(s) to request time off. It’s very likely this home page has many tasks and reports and other things they could look at as well. But these things are not related to the task at hand—requesting time off. Telling the reader all the other things they can also do here is confusing and not helpful.

We need to stay with the task path in the standard operating procedure. So think of it as wearing blinders—you can only see what’s in front of you to the end of the task road.

Grouping and common errors

Let’s continue:

1. Using your company username and password, go to [pretendURLlinkhere] and log into the BlobBlob system.
2. From the menu on the left, click Request Time off.
   (A screen capture here is great, including the items for step 3 and 4 circled or boxed.)
3. Near the top of the page, click the Start date calendar icon. Select the date you want to start your time off. This is your first full day of vacation.
4. Click the End date calendar icon. Select the date you want to end your time off. This is the last day you want to be away. The end date must be after the start date.

Step 3 is all the information needed to set the start date. This is a simple form (pretend with me here) so these are trivial steps and are close together in the form on the screen. We can group or chunk them in 1 step because they’re simple.

We also clarify what we mean by first day of vacation. Our persona might think they need to specify their vacation time starts at the end of the workday instead of the start of the next workday. (If you think this is silly, you haven’t worked with many HR systems.)

Step 4 does the same things step 3 did, but with the end date. We also help with a common error because hands can jerk as you click things and the end date can be set incorrectly. So knowing that’s the case, we help the reader solve a common issue, perhaps before it even happens.

Big finish

Let’s finish these steps:

1. Using your company username and password, go to [pretendURLlinkhere] and log into the BlobBlob system.
2. From the menu on the left, click Request Time off.
   (A screen capture here would be great, including the items for step 3 and 4 circled or boxed.)
3. Near the top of the page, click the Start date calendar icon. Select the date you want to start your time off. This is your first full day of vacation.
4. Click the End date calendar icon. Select the date to end your time off. This is the last day you want to be away. The end date must be after the start date.
5. Review the dates to make sure these are the dates you want off. When you’re ready, click Submit.
6. You see a message on the screen. Read the message and click OK. Your vacation request is sent to your supervisor for approval. You can see approved vacation days on the first screen when you log in.

Step 5 helps the reader know they have a chance to review to make sure they got it right before they click Submit. This helps people understand they can take their time and not worry about making a mistake.

Step 6 tells them what they see on the screen and most importantly, what happens next. They know the request is sent to their boss for approval. Step 6 also tells them how to see approved requests, making them confident they don’t need to pester their boss about this. And then, obviously, we need a procedure we link here that tells them how to view approved and unapproved requests.

I’ve seen some writers put the exact text of the message in step 6 in the instructions. Don’t do that.

First, it’s a nightmare to keep up to date. Why create more work for yourself? Who wants to update the standard operating procedures every week?

Second, in tech comm, we have a concept I call suitably vague. The exact message is on the screen and the reader can read it. We refer to that text, but that text can change every single day, and we never have to update anything in our procedure. So suitably vague provides enough information to get the task done without being a constant source of updates.

Well-written procedures save time and effort

There’s more to good procedures, and I’ll write more about well written, well-structured procedures in another blog post. Use the strategies for technical writing content to improve the instructions you provide your readers.