Ask HN: How does your team keep SOPs in sync with actual workflows?

Don't make me laugh :)

Your approach may help though, seems like it might be an advantage to use high-touch sales efforts.

I'm very procedurally oriented, but not in a software company. Very familiar with SOPs from when the only way to disseminate them was on paper. There are some common denominators between software workflows and physical tasks though.

A perfect SOP that says it all, and is all you need has become more of a formality the more it is required rather than enthusiastically built, embraced, and maintained by every operator.

But nobody's perfect and most of the time there is no enthusiasm whatsoever, so the first thing you end up with is a formality that just barely passes the requirements, and nobody ever wants to look at again.

Consider how it is in an orchestra.

Everybody has their sheet music in front of them at all times, but if that's all you have to go on it's not as accomplished as it could be. The best performers have it well-rehearsed and mostly memorized to begin with and put more into their performance than what can be gotten down on paper anyway. New members can often gain more by learning the particular ins and outs from their associates or conductor, especially when the paperwork is the same old type of table-stakes stuff they have seen before.

I think it would be difficult to cater to orgs where the enthusiasm is top-to-bottom, in the same way as others where it's an afterthought because a checkbox needs filling.