As we near the beginning of the 21st century, the industrialised world continues to change. Economic pressures in all facets of modern industry have made productivity and cost competitiveness increasingly essential to the very survival of companies. Many of them have therefore adopted a very global approach to their work, stressing the importance of considering jobs from a multidisciplinary team perspective, and of following them through all stages of conception, design, planning, preparation, implementation and follow-up. This focus assures successful job completion - on schedule, within budget, with a sufficient level of quality, with minimum cost, and with a maximum change of fulfilling the originally desired goal. This multidisciplinary, start-to-finish approach to jobs can be broadly termed Work Management.
This publication presents the concept of Work Management in very concrete terms: it presents details of how to implement Work Management in such areas as regulation, work management policy, worker involvement, work selection, planning and scheduling, work preparation, work implementation, and work assessment and feedback. Numerous case studies are presented of actual experience from the commercial nuclear power industry. This is a useful tool to help plant managers, maintenance engineers, outage planners, and radiation protection personnel to improve their implementation of work management, which can lead to reduced numbers of workers needed to perform a job, of person-hours spent in the radiologically controlled zone, and thus the overall cost of doing work. Moreover, this also leads to reduced occupational exposures in an ALARA fashion.