SOP creation is a project with a budget, and most teams start it without one. The five steps are the walkthrough with the person who does the task, the draft, the review by someone who has done it, the approval by whoever is accountable, and the training of everyone who follows it. Each has hours in it, and the SOP development cost calculator on this site prices all five from your own figures so the set of procedures is planned as work rather than hoped for.
The walkthrough is where the procedure actually is
The draft is written from watching the task done by the person who does it best, not from memory in a meeting room. The walkthrough finds the step the system does, the decision the manager makes and the record kept for a reason nobody remembers. Skip it and the draft is a guess that the review will have to redo.
Draft, review and approve are three different hours
Four hours drafting, an hour and a half of review and two approvals at twenty minutes each is a little over six hours per procedure, and the approval minutes are the ones always left out of the plan and the ones that stall it when the approver is busy. The calculator adds all three.
Training is usually the larger cost
Five people at twenty-five minutes per procedure across twelve procedures is twenty-five hours of the business reading, which is more than the drafting. Seeing that figure before the procedures are written is what keeps them short enough to train against.
Pace decides the finish date
A team that can finish two procedures a week alongside its real work finishes twelve in six weeks whatever the plan says. The calculator divides the set by your honest pace so a fifty-procedure project is recognised as a six-month one before it is promised as a six-week one.
Questions people ask about sop creation
How long does it take to create an SOP?
The worked example uses four drafting hours, an hour and a half of review and two short approvals; a simple procedure takes less and one that crosses departments takes more. Put in your own figures.
Who should create the SOP?
The person who owns the process writes it from a walkthrough with the person who does it best; someone who has done it reviews it; the person accountable approves it.
Should I create all the SOPs at once?
No. Cost the set, order it by how often each procedure runs and how much goes wrong without it, and finish two a week.