Best Practices for Writing Operating Procedures and Trouble-Shooting Guides

There is no complete, best practice guideline or textbook for writing operating procedures and trouble-shooting guides. This paper presents the proven, best approach for developing accurate operating procedures and for ensuring the page formatting and step writing are optimized to reduce human error rates. This approach and the 32 rules established in this paper are based on the foundations set by Swain and others (in 1970) for control of human error rates, but uses experiences from more than 100 sites where this approach has been successfully followed. The approach and rules for developing operational troubleshooting guides (procedures for responding to process deviations such as those needed for Human IPL) are again the best approaches found and have been applied successfully since the early 1990s. Several case studies are provided that show the gains from following this approach. The guidelines in this paper build upon ones presented in 1999 at CCPS and 2016 at GCPS.