Writing standard operating procedures is a cumbersome task but a serious requirement for businesses the world over.

In many industries it is important to have documentation which shows you have been adhering to ISO guidelines. This can help you clinch major clients and demonstrate your professionalism.

However, when you’re starting out with your first SOPs it can be difficult to know where to begin.

That’s why we’ve pulled together a range of the best free and premium SOP templates for you to work from.

Simply go through the available SOPs below and pick out the one best suited to your needs. We’ve included Microsoft Word templates and Process Street ones too. You’ll also find a guide for writing SOPs to help you get started.

Given that it can be intimidating writing standard operating procedures, we have provided a number of industry-specific examples plus suggestions for how you can pull together basic SOPs even if they’re not documented according to ISO standards.

Read through the following sections to get completely clued up:

• Process Street helps you effortlessly manage your SOP templates
• Our Process Street SOP template for creating procedures
• Writing standard operating procedures in 16 steps
• Using Process Street for your SOPs
• Process Street SOP templates for every industry and sector
• Free Microsoft Word templates to build your SOPs
• More NHS standard operating procedure templates
• Risk assessment SOP templates to review your procedures
• Premium SOP Templates
• Pick the right SOP template and get started

Let’s dive in.
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This is a guest post from Nikola Banicek, an internet marketing specialist at Point Visible, a marketing agency providing custom outreach and link building services. He’s a laid-back guy with experience in PPC, copywriting, and project planning. When he’s not working, he’s either gaming, watching football or anime.

Link building is essential if you want to rank higher and position yourself as an authority in your niche.

The problem is, of course, that link building isn’t easy. It takes time, effort, patience, and skill. The rewards are big – but only if you get the process right.

This is where tools come in.

Tools are designed to solve problems and make your life more efficient. And in the link-building game, there are lots of problems to solve! From finding better link building opportunities to managing your whole projects, tools have got you covered.

But which ones should you be using and for what purpose?

In this Process Street article, we take a look at all the tools you need to set-up an effective link building campaign.

Link building campaign tools: The quicklinks!

• Ahrefs
• Guest Post Tracker
• BuzzStream
• Moz Link Explorer
• Ninja Outreach
• BuzzSumo
• PitchBox
• Majestic
• Broken Link Builder
• Breeze
• Slack
• Google Sheets
• Process Street

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At Process Street, we’re all about process optimization: creating, implementing, analyzing, mapping, improving, and automating.

There are a lot of layers to processes and it’s easy to get caught up in the complexities.

But really, it’s quite simple.

You need to document your workflow and then follow it, making improvements where necessary over time; continuous improvement.

All of this can be summed up by the concept of process optimization.

In this Process Street article, we’ll give you a quick actionable overview of how to optimize your processes with some tips and tricks of what to look for and how to do it.

We’ll cover:

• Process optimization basics: What you need to get started
• The business process optimization workflow
• How to work out the goals of your process optimization
• How to optimize processes with automation
• Process optimization resources to get started now

One of the key parts of driving your business forward is being able to identify and tackle muda.

Is a process taking too long? Is it creating a bottleneck? Are your workers struggling to be productive?

In this Process Street article, we look again at what managers can learn from the Toyota Production System about how to improve your business processes.

The specific concept we’re tackling is muda. Muda translates roughly as waste, and refers to the inefficiencies within processes which you can seek to reduce or eliminate entirely.

As Rene T. Domingo outlines in his paper Identifying and Eliminating The Seven Wastes or Muda for the Asian Institute of Management:

The elimination of waste is the primary goal of any lean system. In effect, lean declares war on waste – any waste. Waste or muda is anything that does not have value or does not add value. Waste is something the customer will not pay for.

We’ll look at the core 7 types of waste Toyota see within processes and production systems and consider the claims for the addition of an eighth.

When it comes to managing what work gets done, we’re often faced with a choice: is this a project, a process, …or both? Project vs process, the age-old debate.

Different tasks need different approaches.

You need multiple techniques in your skillset and understanding the difference between projects and processes, and how this impacts on work, makes for a very useful tool.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• Project vs Process: What’s the difference?
• What is a process?
• What is a project?
• The principles of process management
• How projects can become processes
• Get started with process management today

This is a guest post from Olivia Harp, whose easy-reading, approachable pieces help bring important business and negotiation skill-building content to new audiences in an accessible way. With a degree in linguistics, Olivia excels in creating her own engaging content.

Sustaining customer satisfaction can be challenging in business. However, there are several ways to improve your sales and customer satisfaction at the same time. Improving your sales negotiation skills is an overlooked low-hanging fruit route to making a positive impact on your customer relations.

Through sales negotiation training, you can learn how to identify your customer needs better. Understanding your customers puts you in a position to offer better services. By improving your customer relations, you may be able to attract and retain more customers.

This article outlines practical negotiation tips to increase your customers’ satisfaction.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

• Redefine your business strategy
• Analyze your sales negotiation tactics
• Review your negotiation style
• Additional negotiation skills for customer satisfaction
• Get it right every time with Process Street

When you’re building a business, a team, or any kind of system, you need ways to understand how well you’re doing. That means finding the maturity model that matches the state of your business.

You want to be able to look at your performance and set base standards that have to be met and be able to contrast those standards with an understanding of what best practice looks like.

You want to understand where on that scale of performance you are at.

It’s why we use things like KPIs, OKRs, or other goal/objective-driven metrics.

But those metrics, as useful as they are for some things, are often hard to apply to qualitative data.

This is where maturity models can become an incredibly useful tool.

One model we’ll discuss here is the Capability Maturity Model, and the CMMI Institute alone appears to have about +8500 accredited users of this model (interestingly, in 2018 ~80% were pairing it with agile methodologies).

The problem, though, is that maturity models are often shrouded in complex terminology and overly-convoluted systems. How am I supposed to implement one in my business if people can’t understand it?

In this Process Street article, we’ll tear through the jargon and look at:

• What is a maturity model?
• What are the current limitations of business process maturity models?
• Which are the best business process maturity models?
• What is a Capability Maturity Model (CMM)?
• What is the Agile ISO Maturity Model (AIMM)?
• How does Process Street fit into your maturity model?

Some workflow apps you might be using to help manage your processes require constant attention – reporting, updating, or having to contact other colleagues to get them to complete their section of the workflow.

These are interruptions, and according to Professor Gloria Marks from the University of California, with each interruption, there is an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds wasted to get back to the task.

Other workflows experience inefficiencies simply because your current processes take too long. Full stop.

The more time things take, the more work you have to do.

In this article, we’ll guide you through a series of tools which can help you create workflows, follow workflows, and automate workflows.

• Workflow apps for creating templates
• Workflow apps for task management
• Workflow apps for communication
• Workflow apps for storage
• Workflow apps for recording ideas
• Workflow apps for automated reporting
• Workflow apps for task delegation
• Workflow apps for process automation
• Workflow apps for dual-screening
• Start streamlining your processes with workflow apps

IT security processes need to be place in order for a company to securely run their operations. But what does that really entail? We cover all this and more in our comprehensive look at what IT security processes look like in different departments and organizations.

Take a look:

• Privileged password management
• Network administrator’s daily tasks
• Network security audit workflow
• Firewall audit workflow
• VPN configuration
• Apache server setup
• Email server security
• Penetration testing
• Start protecting your operations today!

Whether starting a business or trying to improve an existing one, you have to understand how things will get done. Writing standard operating procedures can seem complicated on the surface, but with some thought, the process can be easy.

Start by answering the following questions: What tasks do you need to do? Who needs to do them? What are the best ways to approach these tasks?

This will be your first step toward systemizing your business. Consequently, creating processes and workflows will define how your day-to-day activities function.

One popular approach is the creation of SOPs (standard operating procedures). But what exactly are SOPs?

Read through these sections to get clued up:

• What is an SOP?
• Writing standard operating procedures: A quick how-to guide
• Examples of Process Street’s fully-written and usable SOPs
• Ensure your SOPs adhere to ISO standards