Sample Course Slides

Below are some representative course slides from the Industrial Procedure Writing Course.

Definition of a Procedure

This slide shows the narrow definition of "procedure" that is followed in the Industrial Procedure Writing course.

This definition applies to systems, equipment, and processes, whatever their operational state (e.g. running smoothly, shut down).

Readability

This slide describes how procedures must be easily readable on the job. However, the slide also explains that simplicity must not be achieved at the expense of accuracy.

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A procedure must be quickly understood by the Operator.

Steps and Support Content

Steps and Support Content: the two key elements of task instructions.

Publishing checklist

This slide presents part of the Quality Control checklist of factors that should be reviewed in a procedure, and revised as needed, before it is published.

First slide of the discussion about standard quality control considerations during the publishing phase.

Varying personnel perspectives

This slide explains how Engineers and Field Operators personnel have different perceptions or perspectives on the spatial relationships of equipment units at site. The point is that the writer's awareness of these discrepancies will result in fit-for-purpose procedures.

Procedures must reflect the perspectives of Subject Matter Experts in multiple disciplines on the consequences of system events and Operator actions.

Conditional Steps

This slide introduces "If-Then" conditional statements.

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Steps with "If-Then" conditions can be difficult to manage using relatively few words. The course devotes several slides to this topic, including techniques that I have developed to help the Operator navigate this type of step. In particular, this slide leads into the "happy path" concept, designed to help the Operator to zero in on the essential information in order to focus on key decisions when responding to given conditions.

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You can also read an in-depth discussion of conditional steps in my LinkedIn article "Writing Effective Conditional Steps in Industrial Procedures". Parts I and II of this article can be found at the links below:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/writing-effective-conditional-steps-industrial-procedures-cowan-buxnc

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/writing-effective-conditional-steps-industrial-procedures-cowan-1ot6c

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The content of the above article is also included in the Supplemental Notes document (see the Support Materials Page), which is one of the products available on this website.

Quizzes

This slide shows an example of a set of quiz questions that typically appear at the end of a chapter of the Industrial Procedure Writing Course.

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Quizzes are provided at the end of most chapters. The quizzes are animated, i.e. the answers are initially hidden but can be displayed by a click of the mouse.

Workbook

The Workbook chapter contains several examples of problematic content shown side-by-side with corrected versions. Below is a sample pair of original and corrected steps (for the purposes of this web page, they are displayed in vertical sequence).

This slide shows a step in which writing issues are observed. The slide is followed by another in which these issues are resolved.

This slide shows a step in which writing issues (discussed in the previous slide) are resolved.

In the above example, the version of the step in the upper slide has some issues, which are corrected in the version in the lower slide. The NOTE in the upper slide is addressed to the audience of the PowerPoint presentation. The COMMENT in the lower slide is part of the correction itself, and is addressed to the Operator who is following the step.

As well, this chapter includes rework of a complete procedure for starting up a hot water tank, with the original and rewritten versions of the procedure shown side-by-side for easy comparison.