Documenting Standard Operating Procedures in the Fitness and Entertainment Industry

Client

CARA’s client is the market leader in the marine, fitness, bowling and billiards industry.

Challenge

This client was expanding their presence in the U.S. and U.K. by opening large family entertainment centers.
Over the next few years, the client planned to build up to five family entertainment centers per year, and reduce development time from 12-18 months per center, to nine months per center. The accelerated development pace required the assistance of additional resources who are unfamiliar with the process and needed direction and guidance as to how and when to apply their expertise during the development process.

The client asked CARA to help them create a procedural manual for those individuals responsible for the start-up and management of the centers. The manual was to cover the following content:

• Roles and responsibilities of 13 functional areas involved in the development process
• Documentation for each step of the process, from sourcing to purchasing the development property,
  through the center’s opening day activities

Our client understood there were increased risks associated with the increased pace of development. Multiple development projects and higher demands on each of the individuals from each functional area created a serious need for standard operating procedures to provide consistency in the steps, tasks, resources, tools and timeframes required for a successful implementation of one of the centers. Longer term, best practices would be added to the guide to continue to build efficiencies and streamline the process. The objective was to store the procedure manual in a repository on the client’s website. Anyone involved in the process would have just-in-time access and be able to view project status on-demand.

Solution

The client invested significant time allowing CARA to research and collect information from the heads of their
subject matter experts (SMEs); nothing was in writing. For optimum project continuity and control, CARA
organized the project tasks into three distinct phases.

In Phase 1, CARA held initial interviews with the SMEs from each of the 13 participating departments. From these interviews CARA captured the overall development process as well as specific roles and responsibilities for each functional area. CARA created a template to capture the following data on each functional procedure:

• Level of involvement of each department in terms of time and resources
• Roles and responsibilities of individual employees involved
• Departmental deliverables and outputs
• Milestone events and contingencies
• Interactions with and dependencies on other departments
• Roadblocks or hurdles

Results were documented in a findings and recommendations report which enabled the CARA team
to move into the second phase of the project.

In Phase 2, CARA followed the template as a guide to conduct second-level interviews with each SME. The purpose here was to drill down deeper and learn more about what specific steps and tasks are required to successfully open a family entertainment center.

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