Making manuals that work

What Makes a Good O&M Manual?

Our objective is not to create great literature – many manuals are longer than War & Peace. Our aim is to capture large amounts of detail so that any of the wide variety of future users can find what they need whether it be the details of a floor tile that needs replacing following an accident with some inks, or a major overhaul of the Air conditioning.

Last updated on 10 December 2024

Attention to detail

Our objective is not to create great literature – many manuals are longer than War & Peace. Our aim is to capture large amounts of detail so that any of the wide variety of future users can find what they need whether it be the details of a floor tile that needs replacing following an accident with some inks, or a major overhaul of the Air conditioning. This can go well beyond the box ticking mentality of the CDM 2007 requirements and while it might not be great literature, it is often even bigger than War and Peace.

To achieve this we need to capture a lot of detail and organise it in such a way that it is all easily accessible. (See how we do it)

As an example a recent O&M manual for a £13m new build development comprised

  • About 3GB of information:
  • Made up of 2,724 individual files
  • Organised into 1,256 folders

Which translates to about 25,000 pages of information.

And this did not include the User Manuals that we created for each flat as an additional exercise.

Handling that amount of detail requires the use of specialist tools, and these are not available off the shelf - so we have built our own:

  • Collaboration websites for collecting information on each project
  • Built in Drop box
  • Detailed Audit trail
  • Control of review procedures
  • Email updates to managers
  • Conversion tools so we can quickly alternate between Word documents and webpages
  • Hyper link checkers that can verify the links between files are all working correctly
  • Certification signing of Macros to ensure they are not tampered with.
  • Page counter across all the files
  • Print handling tools to help the printers get it all right.
  • And many more

If you would like to know more please call Stephen Milton on 01424 423827 or get an indicative quote for an O&M Manual.

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