Building Procedures with the SOP Toolkit – #1

A wise old philosopher said “The only constant is change” and this has never been more true than in the water and wastewater treatment industry. Even if we only look back twenty years we can easily see tremendous changes. Technology continues to evolve. Environmental concerns continue to grow. Public expectations of safety, quality and service become more demanding. Workforce demographics shift.

These, and other factors, are driving public utilities to deliver more services at a ever more demanding levels of quality and accountability, while contending with limited budgets and an aging and increasingly mobile workforce. Utilities grappling with these challenges are looking for ways to remove inconsistencies and risk from their operations and processes. One of the solutions is to capture and retain the knowledge, skills and best practices, and use them to standardize and train personnel to as high a level of consistency as possible.

Standard operating procedures, or SOPs, are a key tool in these efforts. Utilities, institutions, corporations and organizations of all types see the value in capturing, standardizing and documenting the activities and tasks performed by their personnel. However, that process presents its own set of unique challenges. Most organizations do not have the necessary in-house expertise to design, research, write and produce documentation. Nor do they have expertise in managing documentation processes. And most organizations have not factored the time needed for developing documentation into their staffing strategies.