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Standard Operating Procedures: Document and Hand Over
255 students
Standard Operating Procedures: Document and Hand Over
standard operating procedures | SOP templates | process documentation | delegation skills | onboarding | knowledge base
Last updated 9/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Write a procedure that tells someone what to do, not how things are arranged
- Choose which processes deserve a procedure and which do not
- Draw the minimum BPMN a procedure needs, and nothing more
- Pull tacit knowledge out of the person who has it and never wrote it down
- Build a checklist across phases and roles, with a task library behind it
- Set checkpoints at 1, 7, 30, 60 and 90 days with an owner on each
- Teach a procedure so people can follow it without you in the room
- Hand work over in six stages instead of dumping it
- Make a new way of working stick instead of watching it revert
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
Explore related topics
Course content
14 sections • 39 lectures • 19h 3m total length
Requirements
- Work that only you know how to do
- No documentation or process background required
- Something to write a procedure for, however small
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- Willingness to accept that nobody reads a procedure written as a description
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
You cannot take a proper holiday, because three things only work when you are there. That is not a scheduling problem. It is a documentation problem.
Manuals that nobody opens
Somebody once asked you to write the process down, so you wrote a description: here is how the department is organised, here are the systems, here are the principles. It was accurate, it took two days, and nobody has opened it since — because a description tells a reader how things are arranged, and a person doing the work needs to know what to do next. So the knowledge stays where it was, in one head, and the handover consists of sitting next to someone for a week and hoping. When that person leaves, it starts again from nothing.
What this course covers
Thirty-seven lessons that work backwards from handing work over. Describing first: what a description contains, which processes deserve one and which do not, how it is done internationally, flowcharts and the minimum BPMN, tools and templates, implementing it, checking whether reality matches the drawing, and running the whole thing as a project with a defence in front of senior management. Then extraction, because the hard part is not writing: the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge and why the second kind never transfers on its own, interviews and working groups that pull it out, wikis and knowledge bases, retrospectives on mistakes, and measuring whether anyone reads what you wrote. Then one complete procedure taken apart in front of you: what separates a checklist from a plan, the five mistakes that make these fail in most companies, a structure of three phases against eight roles, step-by-step completion on a real company, a library of sixty ready tasks, a RACI matrix, checkpoints at one, seven, thirty, sixty and ninety days, a metrics dashboard, and the return calculation. Then the same procedure built out as a full process, from the audit and the gap analysis through the ten days before someone starts to the formal close at ninety days. Then teaching it: Dale's Cone, programme design, the four-stage cycle, group dynamics, resistance, and running it online. Then the handover itself: the psychological barriers, six stages, RACI, feedback, and what the freed time is for. Finally the part everyone skips — why written rules get ignored, the eight implementation mistakes, Kotter's steps, urgency, the rider-and-elephant model, quick wins, and locking it into the culture.
Why one worked example, and why it is onboarding
Two blocks take a single procedure apart in detail: bringing a new person into a company. That is nine lessons of thirty-seven and it is deliberate. A procedure cannot be taught in the abstract — you can only watch one built all the way through, to the checklist, the roles, the checkpoints and the metrics, and then repeat the move on your own. Onboarding is the best available example for three reasons: every company has one, it has a measurable outcome, and it fails in about eighty per cent of cases for exactly the reason this course is about — not unwillingness, but the absence of a written procedure.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 37 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working material: process description templates, the minimum BPMN set, knowledge extraction methods, the phases-against-roles checklist structure, a sixty-task library, RACI, the 1-7-30-60-90 checkpoint calendar, the metrics dashboard and return calculation, the four-stage training cycle, the six delegation stages and Kotter's eight steps
One complete procedure built in front of you, not a template to fill in blind
Where to start
Name the three things that stop working when you are away. One of them is your first procedure. Enrol now and start today.
Who this course is for:
- Managers who cannot take leave because nobody else knows the work
- Operations people asked to document how the company runs
- Founders whose processes exist only in their own heads
- Team leads whose written rules are ignored the week after publication
- Quality and compliance specialists writing procedures nobody follows
- Anyone handing over a role and hoping the handover holds
- People who have written a manual and watched it go unopened