Who Should Write SOPs?

The short answer: the person who runs the process day to day — the line leader, the supervisor, the group leader — should own the SOP, and the people who understand its risks — legal, finance, safety, compliance — should supply what goes in it. It should not, by default, be the operators doing the value-added work, and it should not be the Lean Managers.

We reached that answer helping a client establish a Lean Office, where someone asked the deceptively simple question of who should write Standard Operating Procedures. At the company it had become a foregone conclusion: Lean focuses on standard work, so everyone assumed the Lean Managers would write them — and the task was quietly consuming all their time.

It does matter who writes them, and the two obvious candidates are both wrong. Hand the job to the operators doing value-added work, and you pull them off the work that creates value. Leave it with the Lean Managers, and the people meant to be building a Lean culture across the whole facility spend their days drafting documents instead. (They should design the process for writing good SOPs, and write a couple themselves to understand it — but no more.)

The answer follows from a prior question we usually skip: not who should write an SOP, but what it is for.

An SOP is not there to make the work good. Standard work paces it; other standards guard its quality and its handoffs. The SOP does something different: it keeps the work from going wrong — financially, legally, in safety, in compliance. It is the guardrail, not the recipe. So its content must come from wherever the risk lives, and its ownership belongs to the person who runs the process every day, walks the gemba with it, trains new people on it, and improves it as the work changes. The risk experts supply the constraints; the leader owns the living document that binds them to the actual work.

Which leaves a question worth chewing on. Should someone who has baked the same cake for years really consult a recipe every time?

Of course not. But the recipe was never the SOP. You outgrow the recipe. You never outgrow wash your hands, declare the nuts, don’t sell it past the date. The master baker has internalized every bit of craft, but still follows the SOP, every time. Not because of skill. Because of risk.

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