Assignment instructions template. A printable assignment instructions pro-forma — the site, the post, what the officer is there to do, what they are not, and what happens when something goes wrong.

Assignment instructions are the operational contract between a security company and the officer standing at a gate at three in the morning. Everything the officer is expected to do should be in them, and everything they are not expected to do should be in them too — because the second list is the one that protects somebody when a situation escalates.

The duties that matter are the specific ones. Generic instructions describing 'maintaining a security presence' tell an officer nothing about the fire door the contractors keep propping, the gate that has to be padlocked by a particular time, or the fact that the yard floods and the pump has to be switched on. Those are the things the client is actually paying for.

The escalation section fails in a specific way: the numbers go out of date. A set of instructions with a mobile number for somebody who left eighteen months ago is the most common serious defect found in this document, and it is only ever discovered during an incident.

The briefing record is what makes instructions evidence. Instructions in a folder prove a company wrote them; instructions signed by every officer who has worked the post, with a date, prove the people doing the job were told what was in them — which is the question asked after an incident and at every contract review.