Environmental & Risk Management / Clean Building

Working with Hazmat Action Items

You will use these tasks to create and work with hazmat action items:

Manage Project Activity Items
Manage Hazard Assessment Items
Operational Reports/Hazard Activity Summary report

The fields and options that you encounter when working with these tasks are similar to many of the fields you see when working with assessment items. For example, you can:

associate documents with action items
track the status of action items

update a selected set of action items
create new action items by copying existing ones
assign action items to abatement workers, inspectors, and field assessors
update action items in bulk
generate survey items for assessment items

The below image shows many of the fields for Action Item, as well as the actions you can take when associating an action item with the project as a whole.

The following fields and features deserve mention:

Cost Fields

The cost fields for action items are similar to the cost fields of assessment items, except that the additional baseline (preliminary) and design (more accurate) are available.

Costs for assessment items and action items are tracked separately. If you choose to track your costs with action items and you are not using the Project Management application, you must use the Operational Reports / Hazard Activity Summary report to see your cost information.

If you've recorded cost data in action items but want to see this data in the Clean Building reports, you can always summarize the action item cost data and then use these values to complete the cost fields of assessment items.

If you do have the Project Management application and you track your costs with action items, you can use the Project Management reports to analyze cost data.

The Status Field for Action Items

When working with action items for your hazmat assessment items, you are able to track the action's Status as it progresses through your workflow. Typically, managers adjust the Status so they can track and manage actions. The following are the typical statuses managers might set for action items associated with hazmat assessment items:

N/A -- This is the default status when the assessment item is created. Field assessors inspecting items typically retain this status. Managers can change this to reflect the action's current state.
Budgeted -- This item has been budgeted for.
Planned -- Items that have money approved to resolve the item, and for which work is planned out. These items are planned to be resolved in the future, but are not yet scheduled.
Scheduled -- Staff and time have been scheduled to address the item. When this status is set, you can generate one service request for resolving the item.
In Progress -- The work is currently being done. When this status is set, you can generate one or more service requests for resolving the item.
Completed -- The work is completed.
Completed and Verified -- The work has been completed and verified. .

The Description Field

When you save an Action Item record, the system automatically completes the Description field with a description of the hazardous substance that is associated with the hazmat project. You can add your own notes to this field.

Generating Survey Items (Assessment Items)

Note that when you are working with action items with Manage Project Activity, you can use the Generate Survey Items button to generate a set of survey records for the action items you select. Records created with the feature can be considered to be survey items (although they are really stored as assessment items in the system).

This feature is useful when you are using action items to manage the initial work and setup tasks associated with an assessment project, and then want to create assessment items to do the field survey of the locations contained in the action items. You may also want to maintain a link between the initial action item for assessing an area and the ultimate assessment items generated from the action item, in order to track the results (assessment items) of initial “task orders” (action items).

For example, to begin a project, suppose you create one action item for each of 10 of the 30 buildings at one site, for a total of 10 action items. The action title might be “Perform initial walkthrough”. These action items allow you to assign, schedule, and prioritize the work, track progress, status, and costs, and give you all the other benefits of using action items with projects as previously outlined.

After the initial walkthroughs are performed and the data, notes, and documents are added to each action item and evaluated, you decide which buildings need an official inspection immediately, which buildings will be inspected at a later time, and which buildings do not need inspection. For those action items representing buildings that need inspection immediately, you select them and click Generate Survey Items. The dialog box options allow you to generate one assessment item for each room in the building of each action item. You can also generate more than one assessment item per room by using the Location of Material field to specify multiple location types within each room (ceiling, walls, etc.).

At any time in the future, you can select one or more initial “walkthrough” action items and view all the assessment items linked to them by clicking Show Survey Items. For example, you might want to examine the end results of the areas where a particular field assessor did the walkthroughs or the initial estimates after a walkthrough were particularly high. You would use the filter to find (by assignment, date, action type, etc.) and select the appropriate action items, and then click Show Survey Items and examine the details of the displayed assessment items.

Although you could have generated the survey assessment items using the Generate Assessment Items option in Manage Hazard Assessments, the above procedure offers various additional benefits: You don’t have to switch to another task, remember which locations (buildings) you selected, and enter them again in the Generate Assessment Items dialog box. Furthermore, you get the link between the generated assessment items and the “parent” action item.

Note that this feature is completely optional and provided for your convenience only. You can always create assessment items for initial surveys using the Manage Hazard Assessment Items task. See Creating Hazard Assessment Item Records.

Using Action Items with your Hazmat Items and Projects