Preparation, Review, and Agency Approval of Operations Manuals … All on the Web!

Where are we on the operations manual development project? Has anyone reviewed it lately? Has the state reviewed the manual yet? When? Sound familiar? Well, don't feel alone. Many utilities needlessly struggle through the development of operations manuals. The City of Lynchburg's Wastewater Treatment Division in corporation with its design engineer for a recent plant expansion took a different approach. Since the online manual was being developed across the country, why not leverage the power of the Internet to prepare, develop, review, and submit the manual for approval to the State?The project included the development of new manual text including standard operating procedures (SOPs) as well as traditional narrative text. The online operations manual also included other important documentation such as emergency response procedures, drawings, reference documents and vendor operations manuals.The online manual was developed entirely in HTML and Adobe portable document format (PDF). Active Server Pages (ASP) technology was used to access information throughout the manual. As the manual was being developed, it was updated on a daily basis to a secure web file server. Using an authorized username and password, City staff could access the manual at any time and review progress. This also enabled continuous review of manual content and overall format. As new operations SOPs, text and drawings were developed, they were immediately uploaded to the dedicated web server. Figure 1 shows the opening main screen for the Lynchburg online manual.