From IAEA standard to field protocol

An IAEA Safety Standard is a hundred-page document that tells you what "good" looks like in principle. A field protocol is a four-page document that tells a surveyor exactly what to do at 6:00 AM on a windy site with a calibrated spectrometer in their hand. The translation between them is where most consultancies lose the thread.

Three things we do differently

First, every protocol is written by the person who'll execute it, then reviewed by a senior surveyor — not the other way around. The person who has to use the document at 6:00 AM is the person best placed to spot the gaps.

Second, we keep protocols short. If a procedure is more than four pages, the field team won't read it. So we move detail into appendices and version those separately, leaving the protocol itself decisive and brief.

Third, we audit our own protocols at a fixed cadence. Procedures drift; the world doesn't stop changing the moment we write a document. Re-baselining is a discipline, not a courtesy.

Why this is worth the effort

Because the alternative is a binder full of unread procedures and a field team relying on memory. We've audited those programmes, and they don't survive contact with a serious regulator. Translation isn't optional — it's the work.