The Work Action Process is a utility process that manages assignments in an organization. These are usually professional or white collar tasks but they can also be used to track the progress of more manual tasks managed in a Maintenance Manage or other such process. The Condition Reporting (CR) and the Change Management (MOC) Process use the WA Process to manage work.
The Work Action Process is illustrated in Figure 1
Initiate WA: The Work Action Process is intended to manage all the disparate efforts in an organization and provides a convenient way to track commitments and performance. Although they may be manually initiated, Work Actions are typically initiated from other Processes and are used to manage a variety of action types associated with those processes. The MOC Process initiates Work Actions to evaluate a change, plan a change and implement a change. The WA Process is used to track and/or record immediate actions, mitigating actions, and corrective actions initiated from the Condition Report Process. Repeating Work Actions are used to monitor temporary changes to ensure that they are removed when they are no longer needed.
Assign WA: An initiated Work Action is usually routed to the organization responsible for its execution. This WA ends up with the Organization Manager who assigns the work to an individual or work group for completion. In the event that the Responsible Manager, initiating the WA, may want to bypass the Assign WA step and make the work assignment while in the Initiate WA Step.
Do WA: The assigned individual or group proceeds to carry out the instructions for doing the task. The WA process is used for a wide variety of tasks and the WA form is generic. Detailed task assignments and results are communicated through attachments or additional sheets. In order to accommodate situations where additional work is discovered during a task, the WA Process provides the opportunity to initiate additional WA Actions from within the Do WA Step which are routed to the Assign WA Step. This feature enables the ability for the assigned individual to request support for his task. When the WA is complete it is routed either to the Close WA Step or the Complete WA Step.
Close WA: Once the WA has been accomplished, the Close WA Step is used to verify the results and obtain any approvals that may be necessary from the Responsible Organization. These approvals are in addition to any that may be required when the tasks results are reported to the Originating Process. The Close WA Step can identify issues that need additional Work Actions and it can also initiate follow-up Work Actions. Simple Work Actions may not need the Close WA Step and a bypass from Do WA to Complete WA is provided to accommodate these situations.
Complete WA: Once the Work Action has been closed, it is completed and sent to file. There are some cases where the action needs to be repeated at some frequency. In these cases the entry into the Close WA Step (or the exit from the Complete WA Step) can be used to initiate another WA or rest an auto generation function. A prime example is the need to periodically verify the presence and/or need for a temporary change.
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