We left things off playing along in a group exercise to see if we can make some automation improvements to our own day-to-day tasks. Last time, we went through a questionnaire of sorts, and I left you to ponder over my answers for an SOP that hopefully improves my daily writing habit.

Today we’re going to choose a platform, and start reworking our SOP to leverage some low-hanging fruit.

Platform, you say? What are you talking about?

I glad you asked.

When I say “choose a platform” I’m basically talking about a set of software that integrate well together.

In most cases the platform should be obvious to you - a system that you (or your employer) have bought into for email, calendaring, documents, file sharing and workflows. For example, you might be working in a Microsoft environment, with access to Office, OneDrive, Outlook, Sharepoint, and so on. Or maybe you’re a Google-first shop. Or maybe you’ve got some kind of enterprise-wide document management system and branded corporate mail and calendars.

Soup it up!

First thing we’ll do is to choose what you’re going to use for our souped-up SOP. What we’re looking for is the easiest way to create links that will bring us directly to the files, templates, folders and websites that we’re going to use in the SOP:

• If you use Gmail and all your documents are in Google Drive, then choose Google docs.
• If you’re a Microsoft shop and hold files in OneDrive or Sharepoint, then choose OneNote.
• If you’re on Windows and mostly keep files local, then you could use Word.
• If you’re a Mac person, you probably already have it all figured out and are quite smug about it. :P
• Other options for mostly online tasks include Notion and Evernote, especially if you are a heavy user of these systems.

If more than one of these is a possibility, don’t worry too much about it and just choose the program you’re most comfortable with.

Low-hanging fruit

Ok. If you haven’t already, copy your SOP into the document.

Now go through the steps of the SOP and incorporate direct links to each of the inputs, outputs and locations you listed in your document in Step 2.

In most cases, adding web links is as easy as copying and pasting, and then selecting to edit the link to change the displayed text. Alternatively you can highlight text you want to turn into a link and look for the paperclip icon (Onenote uses two connected paperclips) to insert the url.

Links to files and folder locations on the cloud are usually done in the same way - there's usually a dropdown menu next to the file name that lets you copy a direct link. Google Docs has "File Chips" which are... kinda cool.

When linking local files, you may need to choose to upload them to the cloud drive, attach templates to the SOP, or figure out what file location schema works for your system.

If you're having difficulty getting links to work and would like some visual examples, let me know.

What have we got here?

At the end of this exercise, you should have an SOP where at each step, you have a link that brings you to the files and locations you need to complete that step. All you need to do is open up the SOP and start working!

Next we’re going to deal with those triggers.

Until next time, thanks for reading!

– Brendan

p.s. Enjoy this message? Read more at the Hyland Quality Systems website.