Work Planning & Control

Work package preparation and authorisation

A work package is the document set that governs execution of a specific quality-affecting activity. At minimum it should identify: the scope of work, applicable procedures and drawings at current revision, qualification requirements for personnel performing the work, M&TE needed and its calibration status, hold and witness points, and the records to be generated. Work packages must be reviewed and authorised before work begins, authorisation requires sign-off by a qualified supervisor or responsible engineer confirming that prerequisites are met.

Procedures and instructions

NQA-1 Requirement 5 requires that activities affecting quality be prescribed by documented instructions, procedures, or drawings of a type appropriate to the circumstances. Procedures must be specific enough to enable consistent execution, the level of detail should be graded to the complexity and significance of the activity. Simple, low-risk tasks may be adequately controlled by a brief work instruction; complex, safety-significant tasks require detailed step-by-step procedures with explicit acceptance criteria at each step.

Procedures must be available at the point of use during work execution, at the current approved revision. Personnel must follow procedures as written. Departures, even apparently minor ones, must be controlled through a formal deviation or field change process, not resolved informally. The practice of "interpreting" a procedure differently than written, without formal authorisation, is a procedural violation under nuclear QA standards regardless of whether the technical outcome is acceptable.

Hold points, witness points, and in-process inspection

The work package must identify all hold points and witness points in the work sequence. At a hold point, work stops and may not proceed until the inspection is documented as complete and accepted by an authorised inspector. At a witness point, the responsible party must be notified and given the opportunity to observe; work can proceed if the witness declines or does not respond within the notification period, but the notification and response must be documented.

In-process inspections must be performed by qualified inspectors independent of the workers performing the activity, the independence of the inspection function is a fundamental QA principle, not a bureaucratic formality. Results must be recorded in the work package at the time of inspection. Retroactively created inspection records, completed after the fact to satisfy documentation requirements, are records integrity violations.

Post-job documentation and package close-out

A work package is not complete until all records are in order. Close-out requires: all hold and witness point sign-offs are present and legible; inspection records are complete with accept/reject results recorded; any NCRs opened during the work are referenced and their dispositions documented or in progress; as-built documentation has been updated if configuration changes were made; and required post-work testing has been performed and results recorded. Missing records at close-out are not a minor administrative issue, they are quality findings that must be addressed before the package can be closed.

Work packages closed with missing records are a common finding during nuclear QA audits. The root cause is typically not malicious intent but time pressure and inadequate close-out verification. Organisations that implement systematic package close-out reviews, where a quality reviewer verifies completeness before final closure, significantly reduce this finding rate and avoid the more costly scenario of discovering documentation gaps during regulatory inspections.