Procedures

Procedures keep track of anything that needs periodic review or verification: an emergency plan, an earthing check, the annual review of the risk assessment document, an environmental measurement.

It is a prevention and protection action, so it follows the common cycle. What changes is the vocabulary — procedures and reports — and the range of what can be tracked.

Procedures and reports

• A procedure defines what must be reviewed and how often.
• A report is one review or verification on a date.

The most general of the five types

The vocabulary of each type is compared in Terminology by action type.

Where the other types have a fixed subject — a course, a visit, a machine, a device — a procedure can concern any company activity, process or document. This makes it the type to reach for when an obligation does not fit the other four.

Two consequences follow:

• a procedure can have suppliers as recipients, and it is the only type that can. When a supplier issues the certificate for a procedure assigned to them, it is not valid immediately: it goes through an approval by a project manager;
• a procedure is the basis of the permit to work, which is a certificate issued at the end of a procedure with mandatory forms and a time-bound validity.

What to do here

The procedures are the common ones: create the procedure · add the recipients · schedule a report · record the outcome · issue the certificates.