Procedures and the Safety Envelope

DOE-STD-1029-92

Background: The Role of Procedures in

Managing Facility Operations (continued)

The Technical Reviewer's responsibility is to ensure that procedures reflect the true

and complete scope of the applicable technical, management control, and design

bases the procedure is designed to implement.

The Procedure Manager's responsibility is to have a controlled production system

that ensures procedures are correct, usable, and available when needed.

The Procedure Writer's responsibility is to develop procedures that provide

specific instructions for task performance and to use the facility's writer's guide to

present those instructions in an easy-to-follow manner.

The Operating Staff's responsibility is to use procedures appropriately and to

understand their significance in maintaining a disciplined, safe operation.

The development and on-going management of sound procedures, then, rests upon the

availability of a large array of different types of information and the integrated efforts of

facility personnel. If the basis information has not been documented, is inaccurate,

incomplete, or otherwise unavailable to the procedure writer, or if facility personnel do

not actively support the procedure program, procedures will be inaccurate, incomplete or

so hard to follow that workers will avoid using them. If procedures are inaccurate,

incomplete, or not used, they cannot fulfill their primary function of assuring that work

processes are occurring in a safe, deliberate, and controlled manner.

Procedures and the Safety Envelope

The overall safe operation of the facility depends upon the structured interrelationship

among DOE requirements and guidance, the bases documentation (senior management,

technical, management control, and design), and the facility's procedures-- generally

referred to as its safety envelope. In other words, a facility's procedures define how

requirements, management philosophies and strategies, and technical knowledge will be

integrated and applied to performing work in the facility. Figure 1 illustrates a facility's

safety envelope, and shows how requirements, guidance, and technical and managerial

constraints flow down through a facility's basis documentation and are incorporated in the

facility's operations.

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