The student's project SOP

Purpose

To write, before the first bath is mixed, the one document a session-by-session procedure cannot give you: what this whole project keeps in a cupboard for two months, which of its streams meet in one corner, and which of its sequences are hazardous in their order rather than in any single step.

When to use it

Once, at the capstone review gate, and again whenever the plan changes materially — a new toner, a new process, a new room.

It assembles rather than replaces. Every session still runs under its own procedure from this library; what this one adds is the project around them.

Before you start

You should already have the picture in words, the instrument chosen, the chemistry chosen, and the schedule with its waits, from the planning page.

Level B is the ceiling and it is a rule of the specification, not a description of what usually happens. Nothing requiring a fume cupboard, no licensed waste route beyond ordinary photographic and silver-bearing collection, and no work on the mains side of anything. A portfolio ambition that needs one of those is an ambition to change. The Level D processes may be discussed in the report and are never performed.

A raised step is declared, not averaged. The rubric lets a Level A session declare a single higher step with its controls written out, and the capstone uses that for the silver nitrate in its residual tests. What it does not permit is a project spanning several levels calling itself Level B because most of it is quiet.

On the table: the safety data sheet for every substance, read, with its version and date written down by the sheet procedure, because a classification quoted from a sheet you cannot identify is not evidence.

Procedure

The assessment

1. List every substance the project will hold, in one row each: signal word and statements; the quantity actually handled, per session and over the project; the control; what it is incompatible with; and how it is stored.
2. Mark the rows where a personal circumstance changes the answer — a reproductive-toxicity classification, a known sensitisation — and take the substitution route named for it.
3. Write the sequence hazards, which no page-by-page assessment can see. At least four recur: an acid bath and a sulphide toner in one room; thiosulfate meeting acid in the waste corner; a sulphide in a room where photographic material is stored; and a corrosive bottle standing in a household cupboard for a season.
4. For each of those, write a control that is layout or scheduling rather than care: which sessions can share an evening and which cannot, where the acid baths go while the toner is open, where the paper lives, who else opens that cupboard and whether the label means anything to them.
5. Assess the household, not only the bench.

The plans

6. Write the waste plan: a container and a route per stream, decided on the day the stream is created rather than the day it is full. A typical project has four; an alternative-process one has five.
7. Write into the plan itself that it records a route and not a permission, and that local regulation governs. Check your local regulations.
8. Write the schedule, with the waits that cannot be compressed marked as waits rather than as tasks.
9. Write a contingency rule for each of the five failures the planning page names — the build missing its goal, a developer giving an unusable contrast index, a coating or emulsion failing, the subject disappearing, a chemical becoming unobtainable. A rule made calmly in week one can be followed by a tired person in week six.
10. Set the iteration budget for the build now, as a stated number of evenings, because an open-ended rebuild eats the shooting season.

Running it

11. Open the project record with the version identifiers of every formula you will mix, by the versioning procedure.
12. Run each session under its own procedure from this library, and keep its log.
13. Record every declared substitution as it happens: the obstacle, the route taken, and what went untested as a result.
14. Re-read this document whenever the plan changes, and date the revision.
15. Close the project by testing the objects you are submitting, and write the permanence statement in the terms the evidence supports.

How you know it worked

• Every substance has a row, and every row has a sheet version and date behind it.
• The four sequence hazards each have a layout or scheduling control, not an instruction to be careful.
• Every stream had a labelled container and a route before it existed.
• The schedule’s waits are marked as waits, and the build has an iteration budget in evenings.
• Every substitution is declared with what it cost.
• Nothing in the project is above Level B, and the one raised step is named with its controls.

If a step fails

Step 1, a substance’s safety data sheet cannot be identified. Then its classification is not evidence and the substance does not enter the project. Buy from a supplier who publishes one.

Step 3, two sessions have to share an evening and they are an incompatible pair. They do not. Move one, and write the reason into the schedule so the decision survives the week you forget it.

Step 4, the acid baths cannot leave the room. Then the sulphide route is not available in that room, and the plan changes rather than the rule.

Step 6, a stream has no route your authority accepts. The process that makes it is outside the specification. Choose another, and record the substitution.

Step 9, a contingency has arrived and there is no rule for it. Write the rule before you act, even if that costs an evening. The decision made at midnight without one is the decision the rule existed to prevent.

Step 10, the build has missed its goal. Measure the shortfall, diagnose it, and choose between one iteration and carrying the limitation. A measured limitation carried into the work and accounted for scores better than a goal quietly revised.

Step 13, a substitution was made and not declared. Declare it now. A project that names what it could not test is still evidence; one that hides the gap is not.

What to record

The assessment table, the sequence-hazard controls, the waste plan with its caveat, the schedule, the contingency rules and the iteration budget — as one dated document, revised rather than rewritten. Then, through the project: every formula’s version identifier, every session’s own log, every declared substitution with its cost, the residual and permanence tests on the objects submitted, and the final statement of what the evidence supports and what it does not.