July 24, 2026 - Portland News

Dr. Connor Robertson’s Approach to Writing SOPs and Training Docs With AI

Portland News Staff on July 24, 2026

Documentation is the work nobody wants to do and everybody wishes existed, according to Dr. Connor Robertson, founder of Elixir Consulting Group and host of The Prospecting Show. Writing SOPs from scratch is time-consuming and typically gets deprioritized in favor of anything more urgent. Robertson argues AI does not solve the prioritization problem, but it cuts execution time enough that documentation actually gets done.

The Input Problem: AI Cannot Document What It Does Not Know

The most common mistake, in Robertson’s account, is asking AI to write an SOP for a process it has no information about, which produces generic boilerplate that could apply to any business. His fix is providing the raw material first, a voice note narrating the process, a rough bullet-point list, a screen recording transcript, so the AI structures and polishes what already exists rather than inventing it.

The Workflow That Actually Works

Robertson lays out five steps: record a walkthrough of the process, narrating what is happening and why, with a five-minute recording sufficient for most SOPs; transcribe the recording; feed the transcript to Claude with a structured prompt requesting a complete SOP; review the draft and add the business-specific knowledge only a team member would have; and publish to the knowledge base. He estimates the total time at under two hours.

The Prompt That Produces Usable Output

Robertson’s template asks for the role who will use the procedure, the name and purpose of the process, the raw notes or transcript, and a specific format request: a purpose section, a prerequisites section, numbered step-by-step instructions in plain language, a common mistakes section, and a troubleshooting section. That structure, he says, converts rough input into a production-ready document in one generation.

Building a Training Guide From an Existing SOP

Once an SOP exists, Robertson describes a training guide as a roughly 15-minute derivative: feeding the SOP to the AI with a prompt asking it to convert procedural steps into a training format with knowledge check questions, examples of correct execution, and a self-assessment section, one well-written SOP becoming one complete training guide without additional research.

Keeping Documentation Current Without a Documentation Team

When a process changes, Robertson recommends feeding the current SOP and a plain language description of the change to the AI and requesting an updated version, with the revised document ready for review in minutes. He frames this as turning an update cycle that previously required a dedicated session into a short task that gets done in the moment, which means it actually gets done.

The Twenty Percent That Still Requires a Person

Robertson is consistent across his documentation guidance in flagging what AI cannot supply: the business-specific judgment that distinguishes a generic procedure from one that actually reflects how a particular team works. He estimates that gap at roughly 20 percent of any given document, and treats the review step as the part of the process that cannot be compressed further, regardless of how fast the drafting stage gets. In his framing, the goal ofAI-assisted documentation was never to remove the human from the process entirely, it was to make sure the time that person spends goes toward the 20 percent only they can provide, instead of the 80 percent that was always just structure and formatting.

About Dr. Connor Robertson

Dr. Connor Robertson is an entrepreneur, author, and strategic advisor based in Pittsburgh. He is the founder of Elixir Consulting Group, host of The Prospecting Show, publisher of The Pittsburgh Wire, and founder of The Grant Finder. He is also a six-time published author, with titles including Built to Run, available at

drconnorrobertsonbooks.com. More on his work is available at drconnorrobertson.com.

The Lines Between Is the Novel That Reminds You Why You Fell in Love With Psychological Thrillers in the First Place

Portland News Staff on July 24, 2026

By: AP Sanders

There is a specific reading experience that the best psychological thrillers produce and that most merely competent ones approximate without quite achieving, the experience of being so completely inside a story that the real world becomes temporarily less real than the fictional one, where the anxiety you feel for the characters is indistinguishable from the anxiety you would feel for people you actually know, and where the eventual revelations arrive not just as plot resolutions but as genuine emotional events. Danielle M. Wong produces that experience in The Lines Between with a consistency and a completeness that reflects a writer who has not just mastered the technical demands of the form but has found a way to make those technical demands invisible in service of something that feels urgently and authentically human.

The world Wong has built, the specific and revealing world of Hollywood celebrity management, is rendered with enough genuine insight to feel fully credible as a fictional environment while also functioning as a perfect thematic container for a story about the distance between appearance and reality. Stevie Young’s professional life has been organized around the maintenance of that distance on behalf of other people, and the discovery that the distance she has been managing for Dean Bennington and Lana Lim conceals something considerably more dangerous than professional discretion was designed to contain produces a specific kind of personal and professional reckoning that Wong traces with extraordinary sensitivity.

What distinguishes this novel from other Hollywood-set thrillers is not the glamour of its setting but the intelligence of its use of that setting, the way every specific detail of how celebrity culture operates, every specific pressure and specific power dynamic and specific relationship between public persona and private reality, is made to do genuine work in the service of the story’s central concerns. Nothing in The Lines Between is decorative. Everything is functional, which is the mark of a writer who has thought through her material at the deepest possible level before committing a word of it to the page.

The prose itself is one of the novel’s most consistent and most underappreciated pleasures, smooth and controlled and precise in a way that keeps the story moving at exactly the pace it requires without ever calling attention to the craft that is making that precision possible. Wong writes the quiet moments with the same care she brings to the dramatic ones, understanding that in psychological suspense the texture of the spaces between the events is as important to the reader’s experience as the events themselves.

The Lines Between is the novel that reminds you why you fell in love with psychological thrillers in the first place, the specific pleasure of a story that holds you completely while it is happening and stays with you genuinely after it is done. It is Danielle M. Wong’s best work and it deserves every reader it finds.

If you have been waiting for a psychological thriller that puts you so completely inside its world that the real one becomes temporarily less real, that makes you feel the anxiety for its characters the way you would feel it for people you actually know, and that delivers its eventual revelations as genuine emotional events rather than mere plot resolutions, The Lines Between by Danielle M. Wong is exactly that novel. Grab your copy on Amazon today and rediscover why psychological suspense fiction at its best is one of the most powerful reading experiences available.