The Policies
As policies are promulgated and authority is delegated, one eventually arrives at the operating level. By this time, directions and guidelines have become so specific that they can no longer rightly be termed policies but rather standard practices or procedures.
Standard practices are rather specific instructions about how to proceed with a given tasks. Within the framework of established policies, a coach might be taking a track team on a trip.
In a well-organized department, there would be specific guidelines about how many players could be carried, the maximum allowance for food, the method of accounting for expenditures, procedures for dealing with serious injuries, and the conduct of athletes on trips. These and more would be spelled out in written standard practices or similar guidelines.
In many instances, it is difficult to determine just when instructions are policies and at what point they become standard practices. It is impossible to draw a hard and fast line. For this reason, some institutions prefer to use the term guidelines for their sets of instructions.
