For this project, I worked with subject matter experts (SMEs) in several states to create a manual with 90 work practices.
After years of mergers, the company’s work practices sometimes referred to groups that no longer existed or were specific to only one state. They needed an updated manual that applied to all of the company’s workers in every location.
This sample is a work practice for crew members. It explains the job briefing requirements in Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) 29 CFR 1926.952:
I tracked down existing documents in company repostories, on local drives, and in binders on people’s desks. I worked with our SMEs to identify useful content in these documents and merge it into work practice documents that would apply to the entire company.
When the merged information was outdated or subject to new regulations, I worked with our SMEs to update the work practices as needed. I standardized the terminology across all of the work standards and eliminated duplicated and conflicting information.
I created a Microsoft Word template that met the company’s documentation standards and used styles to minimize the formatting burden. As we wrote the work practices, I created a project-specific style guide and document development guidance to help the client maintain the work practices after biennial reviews. I also helped the project manager refine the document inventory so that work practice titles accurately reflected their content. Finally, I wrote training and release notes to introduce changes to the manual’s users.
Here’s a screenshot showing how I set up the work practice template using styles in Microsoft Word:
Just for fun (yep, I said fun), I reformatted this work practice into Markdown. I used StackEdit for the initial formatting, then fiddled around in the GitHub editor to add some GitHub Flavored Markdown (the little yellow triangles with the warnings). Then, I went back to StackEdit to figure out a manual table of contents:
I also blogged about how I created the manual table of contents in Markdown:
[Tutorial: Manually Creating a Markdown Table of Contents for Your GitHub README]() (link to a blog post on this site)
And finally, I recreated the work practice as a GitHub wiki:
Sample Wiki for Job Briefings (link to one of my GitHub repositories)
