I used to work in an industry where everything was driven by the mighty SOP. The industry is heavily regulated and subject to government inspection. During those dreaded weeks when an investigator came to our doors, the organization became a hive of super-activity. People raced from meeting room to meeting room frantically watching what they said and printing off documents that proved we followed our SOPs.
Leading up to these investigations there was a flurry of work as people frantically pulled documents together in anticipation of the event. Mock audits were conducted to strengthen employee training on what was acceptable (and not acceptable) to say. Oh, and there was the frantic audit to ensure everyone's training file was up-to-date on the most recent version of SOPs.
The process of writing these SOPs was lengthy and frustrating. The documents were not written for employee use, they were written to the expectations of the federal government. Some were so simple and basic it was easy to claim they did not instill the requisite level of control. Other SOPs were so rigid and detailed it was nearly impossible to not deviate from them (which required an completely different SOP to remedy the deviation).
Personal interpretation was impossible to account for during SOP creation. Employees would deviate from the SOP just because their interpretation of a given set of steps was different than the original creator of the SOP.
The SOP, something that was supposed to make it easier to do a given job and provide control over a process, was just in the way. Cycle times for given processes were high. Employee creativity for problem solving was eroded all because at some point in the far future we may be audited by a government official.
Business Process Modelling, I believe, is a way to solve the SOP issue. A company must still be careful in how they are followed, but BPM provides control, the ability to test scenarios using company data, reusability for given problems/tasks, and a host of other benefits. I'll be writing more about these benefits in the coming weeks/months.
(The above blog was inspired from here.)