A procedure that survives is not a set of instructions. It is a set of gates. Instructions tell a man what to do. A gate makes it impossible to carry on without having done it, which is a different mechanism and it does not depend on anybody's memory.
Written by JD Davenport, who still sells for a living. Updated 4 November 2026.
Most of them are written as instructions, and instructions decay. The crew reads it once, works from memory after that, and within a month the document describes a process nobody is running.
If the procedure only works because somebody remembered it, the procedure is not finished.
Apply that to each line. If the line says be sure to, check that, remember to, or make sure, it is a reminder and it will fail. Rewrite it as something that has to be produced or answered before the next step can happen.
Not: make sure the crew photographs the deck before shingles go on. Instead: the deck photo is one of the four attached to the job before the material order is released. Same intent. The second one cannot be skipped by a man in a hurry.
The trigger. What starts this. Not the title of the document, the actual event. Contract signed. Material delivered. Crew off the roof.
The owner, by role. Not a name. Names leave. If the answer to how does this work is a person, that is the defect you were trying to fix.
The artifact. What exists at the end that did not exist at the start. A photo set, a signed page, a number in a field, a line on a ticket. A step that produces nothing cannot be verified and will quietly stop happening.
The gate. What cannot proceed until the artifact exists.
The exception. What to do when the normal path does not apply, and who decides. A procedure with no exception path gets abandoned the first time reality does not match it, and it takes the rest of the document with it.
Anything the person already knows how to do. An SOP is not training. It does not teach a roofer to roof. It makes sure that the handful of things that go wrong between people have a route that holds.
Most of the expensive failures in a contracting business are handoffs. Sales to production. Production to the office. Office to the customer. The work itself is usually fine. The seams are where the money leaks, and that is where to spend the pages.
Not at the beginning. Start at the thing that went wrong most recently and cost you the most.
Write that one handoff. Trigger, owner, artifact, gate, exception. One page. Run it for two weeks and watch where people go around it, because they will, and where they go around it is the design defect rather than the discipline failure.
Then do the next one. Ten of those is an operating system. A forty-page document written in one sitting is a binder, and a binder is where good intentions go.
A new hire can run the step on his first day without asking anybody, and the thing it was built to prevent stops showing up. Those are both observable. Whether people say they like it is not.
The production handoffs written as gates, with the artifacts and the exception paths, are The Production Standard. The sales-side handoff is The Appointment Standard. More answers on the questions page.