The management area may also be assessed as a separate functional area, although each technical area includes some aspects of management. Since the functional area focus of the team is a technical or bottom-up approach, any management issues or "root causes" of problems are discovered somewhat indirectly. Direct assessments of management programs are considered to be a top-down approach.
Previous inspection guidance has not included ties between top-down issues and bottom-up issues. Under Management Process and Programs Assessments (MPPA), many of these ties are suggested in advance, making the inspection process more organized, efficient, and complete. The overall MPPA process and the organization of the bottom-up inspection guidance is described in the Overview.
The MPPA bottom-up guidance document originally developed for the U. S. Department of Energy consists of 282 pages of highly integrated questions and activities across five functional areas. The questions and activities are listed in the Table of Contents, with the respective page numbers retained in this online version for information. There is also a corresponding Index that may be used to find cross-cutting topics and to determine whether (and in what context) a specific topic is addressed under MPPA.
The highly integrated organization of the MPPA bottom-up assessment guidance lends itself to the hyperlinks of the Internet. Indeed, there could easily be dozens of hyperlinks on each page, allowing the user to jump back and forth between topics, management's top-down matrix, and the five functional areas. When a plant-specific version of this guidance is developed, such an array of hyperlinks is appropriate for the purposes of team coordination. For example, an inspection team could update their findings each evening and incorporate them into the online guidance document. This not only records the information, but it makes it available to other members in a systematic framework that supports preparations for the next several days of the assessment.