Free guide - The SOP Setup Guide
Two reasons your SOPs died, and neither one is that they were written badly. They went stale, and it’s quicker to just ask somebody.
So you’re not gonna fix this by writing better SOPs. You fix it by making them answer questions and keep themselves current. Here’s how, in four steps. Give yourself an afternoon.
Step 1
Pick one home
One place where your company stuff lives. Goals, your directory, your SOPs, whatever resources people need.
I use Notion for this. I just like the visual layer. But if you’re already on Google Drive or SharePoint, that works fine and you should stay there. The tool matters way less than picking one and stopping.
Sure, one of them is probably a bit better for you than the others. But that’s a way smaller problem than having your stuff in three places. Some SOPs in Drive, some in a Slack pin, some in somebody’s head. Your AI can only be as good as the one place you point it at.
Step 2
Put the right stuff in it
In
- Your SOPs and how-tos
- Process maps
- Who owns what
- Company goals
- Anything somebody asks you about more than twice a month
Out
- Meeting notes nobody reads again
- Anything still being drafted
- Anything personal
- Anything with exactly one reader
Don’t try to get it complete first. Six real SOPs beats forty half-written ones, and your AI can’t tell the difference between “we haven’t documented that yet” and “that page is just wrong.” So start with the stuff that breaks when the wrong person is out sick.
Step 3
Connect your AI to it
Claude or ChatGPT, whichever you already pay for. Both connect to Notion, Drive and SharePoint.
Give it access to the company space only. Not your personal folders, not the financials, not anything you wouldn’t want the whole team to see, because whatever you connect, it can read.
If you want to get this right the first time, give the AI its own login instead of using yours. Then when it edits something, you can see it was the AI and not you at 2am.
Step 4
Ask it to build an index
This is the step people skip and it’s the one that makes everything else work. Your AI needs to know what exists before it can find anything.
Paste this
Go through every page in our company workspace. Build one page called Index.
For each page: what it’s called, what it covers, and when somebody would need it. One line each. Group them by team.
If a page is empty or you can’t tell what it’s for, list it under “Needs a look” instead of guessing.
That last line matters. You want it telling you what’s broken, not covering for it. Then have it rebuild the index whenever you add something. Once a week is plenty.
Step 5
Give it the two jobs
This is the part that keeps the whole thing alive. Two instructions. Paste them into your project instructions or your custom instructions.
Job one, answering
When somebody asks how a process works, find the SOP and answer from it. Quote the actual step.
If you can’t find it, say so. Don’t guess and don’t fill in what you think the answer probably is.
Job two, updating
When somebody tells you a process changed, find the SOP it belongs to and draft the update.
Show me what changed, old version and new version. Wait for me to approve it before you save anything.
That second one is the whole thing. Somebody says “we take a deposit up front now” in a chat, and the doc updates itself. Nobody sits down to revise documentation, because nobody was ever going to.
Keep the approval step. AI drafts, a person approves. Every time.
Two minutes
Test it tonight
Ask it a question that only one of your SOPs could answer. Something real, like how a rush order gets handled.
If it answers right, that SOP is alive.
If it can’t find it, nobody on your team was ever going to find it either. That’s not an AI problem, you just learned something about your documentation.
Honest
What’ll actually go wrong
I’d rather tell you now than have you find out on a Thursday.
It’ll answer confidently from an out-of-date page. This is the big one. A binder nobody opens does no harm. An assistant everybody trusts, reading a wrong page, does real harm. That’s why job two isn’t optional. Get the updating working before you tell the team it exists.
Your first index will be messy. Good. That mess is an accurate picture of your documentation, and the “Needs a look” pile is your to-do list.
Somebody will ask it something it can’t know. Pricing exceptions, the client on the old rate, the thing only you decide. That’s fine. What’s not fine is it guessing, which is why “say so, don’t guess” is in the instructions.
It won’t fix a broken process. It’ll just document a broken one faster. I mean, if the SOP is wrong because the process itself is wrong, none of this helps you.
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