What is assignment instructions?
Assignment instructions are the site-specific document telling officers what they are required to do on a particular assignment — the duties, the patrol requirements, the escalation routes and the site's own rules.
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</figure>They are the operational contract. What a client believes they are buying and what an officer believes they are doing meet in this document, and where it is vague the two diverge quietly over months.
They have to be current and available on site. Instructions held at head office, or a version superseded a year ago still in the gatehouse folder, describe an assignment that no longer exists.
Emergency and escalation content is the part that is read under pressure and therefore the part that needs to be written for someone who is not calm. Who to call, in what order, and what to do while waiting.
In practice
A void industrial unit, two in the morning, water coming through a ceiling.
The officer does the right thing and reaches for the instructions. The escalation page gives a mobile number for the client's facilities manager. That person left eighteen months ago and the number is reallocated.
He rings the control room instead, who have a different number, also wrong, and the water runs for another hour while somebody is found.
Instructions decay silently. The duties stay true for years; the phone numbers go stale within months, and the only moment anybody discovers it is the moment they are needed.
What goes wrong in practice
- Written at mobilisation and never revised as the site, the risks or the contacts changed.
- Officers deployed without having read them, with nothing recording that they were briefed.
- Held only in a folder on site, so a relief officer arriving to a locked office has none.
- Escalation contacts out of date, which is discovered during the incident rather than before it.