Standards: A few tips to help get your point across

David A. Chappell, Make2Pack chair, and other ISA88 Part 5 committee members provide intelligence and specific links for the “Standard Profits” blog on www.controleng.com (visit the Website and click on the “Blogs” tab to access). The blog spans OMAC, WBF, and ISA standards efforts.

By Control Engineering Staff

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David A. Chappell, Make2Pack chair, and other ISA88 Part 5 committee members provide intelligence and specific links for the “Standard Profits” blog on www.controleng.com (visit the Website and click on the “Blogs” tab to access). The blog spans OMAC, WBF, and ISA standards efforts.

According to Chappell, here are a few ways to help increase the chances that your voice will get heard in a standards committee comment and review process.

• Participate!

• Use forms provided, following rules and meeting deadlines.

• Be as specific as possible about the change and why it is needed.

• Do not provide open-ended comments with no resolutions.

• Highlight the text that you’d like changed.

• Offer exact replacement text in the language of standards, if possible.

• Offering a marked up document for wider changes (in addition to forms) may help.

• Match the degree of changes offered to the time in the process. (More toward the end, changes are likely to be more clean-up of smaller details. Broader changes are better addressed earlier, if you can find someone involved on the committee to work with, if you’re not on the committee yourself.)

If your views are rejected, or accepted only in part, those involved should give a brief explanation of why, says Chappell. “Please don’t ever take any of it personally (a lot goes on that you may have missed), but do ask those involved for more explanation, if you don’t understand why. Doing so may mean that next time your comments may be more useful,” he says.