In Part 1 of this blog, I talked about two main development processes that software developers use, waterfall and agile. In this post, I’d like to examine how those processes are relevant in business process, not just in software development.

I have the privilege of working closely with a number of our software vendors to help them improve their products both for our use and for their entire client base. As I have worked with them, I’ve discovered that there are some amazing correlations between software development processes and business development processes. Those similarities have changed the way I look at development, in many areas.

Over the past few weeks, I have personally witnessed some incredibly horrible cases of customer service and some amazing cases as well. While tremendous amounts of money are spent on marketing to acquire new clients, often, existing clients are taken for granted or overlooked. It amazes me to see how much people, and companies, often ignore basic customer service and undervalue its benefit.

In the last blog, I walked through things we have learned to be able to Write Great SOPs. This is great but it falls short if all you do is stop there. Businesses, people and processes should be continuously maturing and improving. The difficulty is in figuring out how to get this to happen in a consistent fashion.

Two weeks ago, I had the privilege to speak at one of the premier IT industry events in Orlando, FL. One of the sessions was titled SOPs for your SOPs and really covered two topics. The first was how to write great SOPs and the second focused on building a solid culture around continual process improvement. While I tend to focus heavily on finding our flaws and continuously seeking to improve, I can tend to forget to see what we do well. It was rewarding and an honor to share with the attendees what we have learned, often, from our own mistakes. In this blog, I’m going to focus on things that we have found are critical to writing great SOPs.