The migration of paper-based work packages to an electronic version for the nuclear power industry results in opportunities for work optimization through data analytics and integration. This can only be achieved if the work package is broken into its data elements and stored in a structured data form. The contribution of this paper is the development of a set of guidelines that enables creating a data model from breaking the work package into its data elements. The data model can be used to create a common information model for work packages at nuclear power plants. The results presented and discussed in this paper highlight distinctive data model characteristics regarding the work element properties and associations; work package topology; properties cascade; elements and properties function; templates and instances; and steps flow. In total, 13 guidelines were identified as part of this work. The resulting benefits from the extracted data model are enabling step-level review of the work, reducing planning effort, and automating work package creation and formatting. In addition, coupling work process data with other data sources at the plant improves overall maintenance activity efficiency by enabling capabilities such as real-time schedule update and automatic allocation and release of work resources.