Current description – Focus on Project Planning

Overview:                        

The ERTP Uniform Federal Policy for Quality Assurance Project Plans (UFP-QAPP) training course is an 8-hour course designed to gain participant buy-in regarding the need for QAPPs, change behaviors, and provide technical guidance regarding the review and use of the UFP-QAPP format for U.S. EPA environmental information (not just lab data!) gathering activities.  The course targets project decision makers – remedial project managers (RPM), on-scene coordinators (OSC), information end users, and quality assurance (QA) personnel – as well as technical staff who support planning and environmental information collection, processing, validation, and use.  This course focuses on aspects of the UFP-QAPP that project managers/decision makers need to focus on, but also provides an overview of those parts of a UFP-QAPP that are largely chemistry-related which chemists and other technical specialists would focus on.  The course teaches decision makers and technical support personnel what should go into UFP-QAPPs, i.e. how to manage and review them, NOT how to write them.  The course will involve three primary modes of teaching: lecture with audio-visual aides, exercises for course participants using example UFP-QAPP worksheets, and plenty of time for answering participant questions and open discussion.

Target Audience:            

EPA Project Managers, project planners, decision makers, information end users, chemists, lab procurement specialists, technical auditors, information validators, information assessors, and QA Managers; basically, anyone involved in any phase of environmental information (not just lab data) gathering, analysis, validation, interpretation, use, and decision making.

Course Objectives:

• Understand that you must have QAPPs for your environmental investigations and learn why you will want them
• Know that the heart of your project and of the QAPP is planning and developing the problem statement, objectives, and the decisions that you need to make
• Know that chemistry is in service of project planning and decision making – chemistry gets you the information you need to make your decisions!
• Gain understanding of elements of a UFP-QAPP that focus on:
  • Project planning
  • Defining the problem in the form of questions that support the decisions that need to be made
  • Setting objectives
  • Establishing decision-making criteria
  • Defining project action limits and analytical sensitivity needs
  • Defining field sampling activities and requirements
  • Defining the information usability assessment process for assessing whether the information gathered is of sufficient type, quantity, and quality to enable decision-making
• Learn:
  • To carefully consider who the information end users are and get their help in planning
  • What to look for in your UFP-QAPP to make sure that it will achieve the objectives of the investigation.
  • About the chemistry-related elements of a UFP-QAPP and what needs to be in them
  • That project managers do not need to know the chemistry content in detail, but that they should pass on those parts of the QAPP to their technical experts to review