Assignment Guide: Draft SOP

Assignment/ Portfolio Activity 2.12
Now that we have studied the context, content, structure and methodology of producing SOP we can commence our mid-term assignment—Assignment 1:  Produce Draft SOP.  We need to follow the proposed process for production of SOP, covered in Section 2. I would suggest that you save a copy of your completed draft SOP into your Professional Practice Portfolio, as this will be a good example of SOP development work you have undertaken in an actual community setting.

As your SOP are going to be based on the Emergency Management Plan that you prepared during the previous subject (EMG103) you should carry out the following activity before commencing the assignment. 

Read and review your assignment 2 from EMG103 (The Emergency Management Plan for ‘X’) paying particular attention to the following:

	1.	What is the priority hazard you want to address in your SOP?

2.	What resource needs did you identify and who were the agreed providers?  Specifically look at the roles and responsibilities the organisation for which you are writing the SOP agreed to undertake.

3.	For your particular hazard what were the agreed command, control and coordination arrangements?

4.	Review your comments on existing procedures and see how you could improve those procedures.

5.	Consider any existing emergency arrangements that you identified and start to think how you will ensure that your SOP are compatible with them.

Having completed the above you should now be ready to commence your first assignment for this subject.  If you have managed to complete the study to date and associated work within the time frame we have allocated, you should now have some 14 hours to complete this task.
The requirement
Assignment 1 - Draft standard operating procedures	Weighting:  20% of final subject mark
Read the Assignment 1 guidelines contained within your Subject Outline for this subject. This assignment guide provides you with the rational for this assignment as well as the tasks that are required to be undertaken.

Work through each step of the SOP development process as required for the assignment. You will find that you will quite likely have to refer back to your study guide notes and activities whilst you undertake these tasks. Remember, we have provided some guiding tables/ matrices for displaying/ explaining the information within your SOP. You are not bound to use these, however, unless you have a more appropriate method, I would suggest that as a minimum, you base the documentation of your SOP on the information contained and required within each of the tables and matrices.

If your SOP will be used in an actual operational context, I would suggest that you consider using one of the alternate methods that are contained within the examples provided in the readings. One good example is that of the Launceston City Council’s Flood SOP (Reading 5). This is an actual set of SOP developed by the Launceston City Council. They used this format after examining a number of different methods/ formats. They found the use of Duty Cards, supported by a “front end” contextual, administrative and management “instruction” or Introduction was the most appropriate method for their need. You will note that although they haven’t formally provided a matrix containing the who, what, where, when, how and why, they have provided that relevant information within the SOP Introduction, Instruction and Duty Cards.

Irrespective of the method you use, when you compile your draft SOP, do not forget to provide answers to the six questions (Who?  What?  When?  Where?  How?  Why?) and, if there is no better method, apply our suggested production process.