Sustainability & Risk / Hazard Abatement / Environmental Hazard Manager
Using Action Items with your Hazmat Items and Projects
When managing your hazmat projects, you will find that there are many details and tasks to manage and organize. For example, you might need to:
- budget the various phases of a hazmat project, such as
- budget the cost of the initial internal assessment
- budget the cost of the formal inspection
- budget the cost of response actions
- review bids from abatement companies
- correspond with labs that test your samples
- file permits and applications with appropriate local, state, and federal authorities
- notify your HR department and employee safety personnel that an abatement project is in process
- clear personnel from an area the day that abatement will occur
- schedule a final inspection when abatement is complete
- periodically test the air to be sure that hazardous material has not returned
To manage this process, you can set up a series of action items ("to do" items) for each step in of the hazmat process. Action items provide a clear audit trail of your project. By setting up action items, you will be able to prove to the appropriate regulatory agencies that you followed all required steps in handling an issue.
The Hazard Abatement application offers two ways to work with action items:
- create action items for the project as a whole
- create action items for individual assessment items
Whether an action item is associated with the project or pertains to an assessment item, it will appear in the Manage Project Activity Items task . This task has a Category filter so that you can choose to show action items associated with a project, action items associated with assessment items, or all action items.
Creating Action Items for the Project
Action items are handy for outlining the various steps of an abatement project. For example, the default Hazard Problem Types in the sample HQ project outline the major steps that you might take in managing a hazmat project. You could set up a series of action items for each of these major steps (Hazard Problem Types) so that you have a basic system for tracking and self-managing workflow.
For example, for the Hazard Problem Type of CB|ABATE, you could set up "to do" (action) items that map out the tasks of hiring and working with an abatement company, such as:
- Put abatement job out to bid.
- Compare estimates from each abatement company.
- Select abatement company.
- Verify certification of selected abatement company.
- Notify staff of abatement project.
- Clear staff out of areas to be abated
- and so on...
For each of these steps recorded with an action item, you can track costs, record documents and notes, set priorities, set baseline and design time frames, and so forth.
The level of detail to which you track the process is determined by the level of audit trail required by your site.
Further Detail Assessment Items with Action Items
You may wish to use action items to further detail a particular assessment item.
For example, suppose you ran a field audit for which you had created an individual assessment item for each room to visit. The field inspection shows that some rooms have multiple issues that must be addressed. For the assessment items for these particular problem areas, you can set up action items that set a priority for each issue, track the duration of each issue, and so forth.
As another example, you may wish to set up action items at both the project and assessment item level. For example, you could have action items for estimating the cost of the initial internal assessment and the cost of the formal inspection, and associate these action items with the project. Then, for each individual assessment item, you could set up an action item to budget the cost of responding to this issue.
When you associate an action item with a specific assessment item, carefully consider in which tool's fields you will track your data. The two items have similar fields, such as cost fields, assignment fields, and status fields. If you create several action items for an assessment item, be sure that the data that you track for each action item pertains only to that action item and not to the assessment item as a whole.
Note: Hazard Abatement reports are based on assessment items. The details that you track with an action item appear only in one Hazard Abatement report: the Operational Reports / Hazard Activity Summary report.
Integration with the Archibus Projects Application
The Archibus Projects application uses action items to track the details of a facility management project. Built on action items, the Projects application enables you to perform such tasks as:
- automate the bidding process
- compare bids to estimated costs
- analyze variances, history, and trends
- set up approval processes
- monitor the details of working with outside vendors that are involved in the project
If you have a license for the Archibus Projects application, you may wish to use action items to track your hazmat details so that you can use the many reports and tools of the Projects application to manage the details of hazmat issues. For more information on the Projects application, see Archibus Projects.
An advantage to this approach is that you can view and track your hazmat projects along with all your other facility projects, and include hazmat projects in all of your analysis reports. For example, a report that shows schedule variances will include hazmat projects along with other facility projects, such as projects for general ground maintenance, traffic studies, and renovations.
Note: Although you need a license for the Projects application in order to use its prioritizing, scheduling, reporting, and other features on your hazmat action items, you do not need a Projects license in order to create hazmat action items. You can create action items and view them in Hazard Abatement and review them using the Hazard Abatement application's Operational Reports / Hazard Activity Summary report.
Examples of Using Action Items
How you take advantage of the details that action items can bring to your project depend on operations at your site. The following are some reasons why you may want to use action items for your overall project or to further detail assessment items:
- You want to provide a workflow and audit trail for the hazmat project as a whole; that is to say, you want to provide an audit trail of actions taken, dates, associated documents, notes, and so on.
- You want to provide more details on the steps involved in managing a particular assessment item. For example, for a particular area that is hard to access, you want to create "to do" items for granting abatement workers and inspectors to access to the area.
- You want to estimate baseline (preliminary) and design (more accurate) costs.
- You want to estimate baseline (preliminary) and design (more accurate) time frames.
- You want to prioritize work.
- You have the Projects application and want to include your hazmat projects, and their details, in your summary reports.
- You have the Projects application and want to use its features and reports to:
- automate the bidding process
- analyze variances, history, and trends
- set up approval processes
- schedule work
- monitor the details of working with outside vendors who are involved in the project
See Also