The Procedure Paradigm
Whenever I’ve gone to a new company, there’s always a learning curve to just get the hang of the basics. I asked if there were procedures for such a task. Nothing but perplexed looks. The more I asked, the more I realized that everyone had their own way of doing things. Their methods were all based on tribal knowledge and the reasons were lost in the past. In this post, we'll explore the importance of formally documenting important processes.
The likelihood of someone using a tool is heavily dependent on how that someone views value in that tool. I often see an identity crisis in a facility's procedures: SOPs, Guidelines, Work Instructions, Job Aides, Checklists, One Point Lessons, Procedures, Task Sheets, and the list goes on. All of these have instructions for how a task should be performed, yet they each carry a different brand - different formats, different processes for maintaining them, different sign off requirements, and different repositories. Workers have formed their own opinions for which of them are valuable or necessary - in some cases, none are!
Our whitepaper on Document Hierarchy - Planning for More Usable Procedures provides a functional roadmap from which any regulated, risk averse industry organization can build their plan for organizing documents.
Remember the last time you bought a piece of furniture or a kid’s toy that had ‘some assembly required’ printed on the box? As we all know too well, after the box opens, that ‘some assembly’ is a blatant lie! I always rummage through the boxes to get the instructions and start identifying parts (a procedure of sorts) due to my numerous mistakes with assembly. The instructions that come with products that we buy are procedures. We usually don’t think of them that way but they provide us guidance for operating or assembling a widget and that’s what we use procedures for in the workplace. From these similarities, we can translate our personal experiences and lessons-learned at home into the procedures that we use in the workplace. These experiences, and errors, from home are very relatable to the first time use of a good procedure in the workplace.
The past four decades in the chemical process industry have seen several watershed incidents which have been a source of many lessons for process safety and risk management. An important area of concern and debate is the role played by ‘human error’ as a cause of these incidents. Recent emphasis on the importance of the ‘softer’ factors of safety including human factors such as fatigue, stress, cognition etc. have attempted to demystify ‘human error’ by providing opportunities for improvement by offering systematic tools and framework to analyze systems to reduce the chance of these errors. A keen focus of this is Procedures; operating and non-routine procedures play an important role in daily operations both as a preventive and mitigative barrier in case of abnormal situations.
As a business consultant with a focus on helping companies achieve operational excellence, I often try to solve why companies are not consistently achieving quality and safety results. The answer reveals the same problem many companies face in today’s more complex corporate world: Standards. In many cases I hear leaders talk about problems with inconsistent quality and when I ask to see their “management systems” I find they have very few if any written plans, processes, procedures, or standards. This is not just a small company thing. I have observed this in very large organizations.
Procedures can be extremely powerful tools. They can help us safely operate almost anything on the planet; from airplanes to nuclear reactors to locking doors at the close of business. Do we really need to use the same step-by-step, circle-slash, peer-checked, independent verification procedure for each of those tasks?
All domestic commercial nuclear power plants use paper procedures. We use procedures for administrative, operating and maintenance, basically whenever we need a step-by-step method to get from point A to point B. There are probably nearly one thousand of them at every station.
While we have a structured system of creating and modifying paper procedures, there are several inefficient and ineffective downsides. Over time these procedures have mutated to have many steps that the craft have to migrate through like lawyers.
We believe in pushing the envelope to provide the absolute best procedure to employees at the time they need it. You'll hear our thoughts as industry leaders in this space as well as thoughts and experience of other notable pioneers. Ultimately, Next Generation procedures should enable every employee to go home with all of their body parts which requires a shift in the paradigm of procedures.
In our first post, Nate Rightmer shares thoughts on the human error conundrum, how compliance is failing, and a view of the procedure paradigm.
