SOP vs Reality Audit
Compare an SOP with what people actually do: skipped steps, workarounds, bottlenecks, and single points of failure.
Before & after
Same prompt, same agent — the only difference is the skill.
Operational audits check how well your team is running day-to-day. You'd look at things like whether processes are documented, how many manual steps people are doing that could be automated, whether there's redundancy, where bottlenecks exist. Communication and coordination between teams matters. You'd check if the right people have the right access to tools. It's good to ask the team where they feel inefficient. There are probably some quick wins where small changes could save time. You should probably prioritize the biggest pain points first.
I'll run a structured operational audit to identify process gaps, automation opportunities, and efficiency losses. AUDIT FRAMEWORK PROCESS MAPPING Document each major workflow: onboarding, order fulfillment, support tickets, reporting. For each, list every step, who does it, how long it takes, whether it's manual or automated. BOTTLENECK IDENTIFICATION Which steps are dependencies (block downstream work)? Which ones are done by one person (single point of failure)? Which ones take disproportionate time? Examples: • Expense reimbursement: 5-day approval chain, each person waits 1 day • Customer data sync: manual daily CSV upload instead of API • Meeting scheduling: 3 back-and-forth emails per meeting • Report generation: 2 hours of manual data consolidation from 4 sources REDUNDANCY CHECK Are multiple people/teams doing the same task? Are there overlapping approval gates? Could decisions be centralized? AUTOMATION OPPORTUNITIES Quick wins (1-2 day project): • Slack autoresponder for routine questions • Email template for repetitive replies • Zapier/IFTTT for tool-to-tool sync Medium effort (1-2 week): • Script to auto-generate reports • Dashboard to replace manual status checks • API integration for data flow COST-BENEFIT RANKING For top 10 opportunities: hours saved per month x hourly cost = annual savings. Rank by ROI. DELIVERABLE Audit report with process map, 5-10 ranked improvements, and a pilot recommendation.
About this skill
Your SOP says one thing and your team does another. This audit compares them step by step using tickets, logs, and interviews, so you can see which gaps are risks and which workarounds should become the process.
What it does
- Breaks the SOP into auditable steps with owners, inputs, outputs, and controls
- Reconstructs actual practice from a sample of real cases and measures how often each step is followed
- Classifies divergences: skipped, undocumented, reordered, workaround, role drift, and dead steps
- Finds bottlenecks from timestamps and single points of failure in people, access, tools, and knowledge
- Ranks fixes by impact and likelihood
What you get
An audit with a step-by-step comparison, undocumented steps, bottleneck and SPOF tables with recovery times, a ranked fix list, and the SOP updates needed.
Best for
COOs, ops managers, and team leads preparing for scale, handoffs, audits, or the departure of a key person.
SKILL.md preview
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name: sop-reality-audit
description: Compare a documented process (SOP, runbook, playbook, checklist) against how the work is actually done - from tickets, logs, timestamps, and interviews - to surface skipped steps, undocumented workarounds, bottlenecks, and single points of failure, with a fix list ranked by risk. Use when the user says "our SOP doesn't match reality", "audit this process", "who is the bottleneck", "what happens if X leaves", or is preparing for an operational review, handoff, or scale-up, including casual asks like "nobody follows this checklist, why?", "is this runbook still accurate", or "how screwed are we if Priya goes on leave".
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# SOP vs Reality Audit
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