Documents recurring processes as step-by-step SOPs with decision points, edge cases, and a named owner, so anyone can run the process correctly without asking. Use when someone asks "write an SOP for this", "document our onboarding process", "this only lives in one person's head", or wants to delegate a recurring task safely. Do NOT use for incident-response or on-call operational runbooks - use runbook-writer instead; for customer-facing product documentation, use help-documentation.
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name: Process Documentation
description: Documents recurring processes as step-by-step SOPs with decision points, edge cases, and a named owner, so anyone can run the process correctly without asking. Use when someone asks "write an SOP for this", "document our onboarding process", "this only lives in one person's head", or wants to delegate a recurring task safely. Do NOT use for incident-response or on-call operational runbooks - use runbook-writer instead; for customer-facing product documentation, use help-documentation.
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# Process Documentation
A Standard Operating Procedure lets anyone perform a recurring process correctly without asking. The costly failure it prevents is silent: the one person who knows the process leaves, gets sick, or goes on vacation, and the team discovers the "documented" process was actually tribal knowledge. Good SOPs reduce errors, enable delegation, and survive turnover - but only if they cover the branches, not just the happy path.
## Operating procedure
Follow the steps in order: qualify before writing (most processes do not deserve an SOP), and validate before publishing (an untested SOP is a rumor with formatting).
### Step 1: Qualify the process
Write an SOP only when at least two of these hold; otherwise the documentation cost exceeds the risk:
- The process runs weekly or more often, or will be run by more than one person.
- A mistake costs more than an hour of rework, money, or customer trust.
- The knowledge currently lives in one person's head (bus-factor risk).
If the process fails all three, capture it as a two-line checklist note and stop.
### Step 2: Gather inputs
… install to load the full skill