Creating Personal Professional Recipes
As a small disclaimer, I must say this has nothing to do with cooking recipes! so if you’re here about that, I am sorry you will be disappointed. But! f you’re here to help others as well as yourself, then you should stick around!
Where did it all begin?
In my last role as a Program Manager for a successful free-to-play video games company, I started to spread the idea of creating and sharing what I called at the time SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) to serve as a kind of reference handbook which covered a wide array of topics from how to create the Central Technology Team’s weekly blogpost to how to utilise a URL to create tickets in JIRA. At the time I chose the name (SOP) as I thought it added a bit more weight to the various topics, but I was totally afraid that people would take this as a rule book and only operate within the realms of the SOP and not add their own flare.
Let’s go back to why I actually started down this SOP path. I would say my knowledge is wide and varied, I have knowledge in some really interesting areas and as I am always trying out new tools and processes, I believe that I can share a lot of insights which could help others learn and improve what they are doing. It all started out by me looking into a mirror and realising that I was turning into a bottle neck on a wide array of topics as I was the one usually owning a specific area as I had the knowledge. I often heard “I don’t know how to do that” or “I wouldn’t know even where to start” so this lead me to create some documentation in a how-to manner to enable me to delegate a wide array of topics and empower the team.
Along this journey I also realised that in the process of me documenting the various processes and recommend practices for tooling that it challenged me to also reflect on the topic and to try and minimise the number of steps in the method or ask “Is this actually the best way to achieve this” this can be likened to “rubber ducking” (as known in the development world) and I realised that this was actually a very powerful tool and platform for my own personal development.
Why did I move away from the terminology of SOP?
Actually, I moved away for a number of reasons but the main factor of me renaming SOPs to Recipes is purely the mind-set associated with both terms. My main motivation in creating these guides / documents was to enable a very good base to enable people to make the various topics their own and overtime improve them and update the details. This is similar to food recipes, if you’re not confident in cooking something, you tend to stick to the exact measurements and steps involved with the Recipe and then once your confident you either improve it in terms of efficiency or add your own flare to it! and thats what my original intention with this process was. So renaming Standard Operating Procedures which feels and sounds very rigid, dull and boring to Recipes instantly improves the appeal and understanding of what I intended with the process.
Open Source & Wikipedia
You can think of the whole idea in the same way Open Source and Wikipedia works. Someone creates something and then enables others to edit, optimise and change that was originally started.
What is next for me and my recipes?
I am actually slowly building my Recipe Book with some of the very standard topics, processes and tooling which I know and making them publicly available via Medium. You can access my Recipe Book here: https://medium.com/modern-recipes
How can you start?
You don’t need anything fancy! It’s just as simple as having a Google account and utilising Google Docs and then just sharing links around. I can highly recommend it as a very good exercise to test you and share your knowledge! I truly believe in the mantra “sharing is caring” and this approach is a very good way to actually give back.
