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Blog Mil-Std-882E Risk Assessment

Designing Your Risk Assessment Program

Designing Your Risk Assessment Program. Which Ingredients should we use? In this post, I draw upon my 25+ years in system safety to give you some BOLD advice! I’m going to dare to suggest which analysis tasks are essential to every System Safety Program. I also suggest which tasks are optional depending on the system that you are analyzing.

Which Ingredients should we use?

  • Everything – high novelty, challenging requirements, bespoke development and massive scrutiny);
  • The Bare Essentials;
  • New Designs and Integrations;
  • The Human Element;
  • Electronics, Software and Data;
  • Combining existing Systems; and
  • Environmental Protection.

Video Highlights

Designing Your Safety Program – Highlights (SSRAP M4)

Topics

Designing Your Risk Assessment Program: Transcript

We’re onto Module Four – Designing Your Program.

This module aims to show you how to design a systematic, effective strategy for Risk Analysis. An effective program for Risk Analysis that isn’t wasteful. This module is a little bit longer than the others but bear with me! This is the real meat of what I promised you. So, let’s get started.

Multiple Points of View

As I said in a previous slide, we will deal with multiple points of view. We will use multiple points of view to look at the system from many different angles.

Ten different angles, in this case, one for each task. Each of those tasks brings a different perspective. So, each task has a different purpose. What they have in common is they are all there to bring out a different aspect of the system. They are different kinds of analysis, but they all have the same aim. To identify hazards and analyze hazards.

From that, we can then identify what we need to do to control those hazards. And that, in turn, gives us safety requirements. Sometimes they’re called ‘derived safety requirements’. They need to be met for the system to be safe. That’s the whole point of what we’re doing, as mentioned before.

Which Ingredients?

But if you’ve got everything then you only need all those 10 tasks if everything is in the red. Perhaps you’ve got a very novel system. You’ve got challenging performance requirements. You’ve got lots of bespoke development. And you’ve got a very critical system that’s going to get a lot of scrutiny. So, you need all 10 only if you’ve got a development from hell. Where you’ve got a very challenging development and you need all the tools you can get.

Now, that’s fine. That’s what the standard’s designed for. But very rarely are we going to work on a program where we’re pulling out all the stops. More often, we’re going to be working on something where there are some challenging areas and some less so. And we don’t need the entire program. We don’t need all 10 tasks to achieve success. And it’s OK to tailor your safety analysis to deliver value for money. In fact, this approach is better.

So, we’ve got some options here. I’m going to take you through the bare essentials. Those are what you need to do for every safety program. The work that we would do to address new designs and new integrations. Work that we would do to address the human element. This includes both parts of human factors. That’s the human contribution to safety and the impact that the system might have on human health. So, there’s a bit of back and forth in there in the two tasks there.

Then if our system has got programmable electronic software, we might need to look at that. Or if it has data that is being developed or modified, we need to look at that too. We need to assess the safety implications of the modifications/development. We might consider combining existing systems into a system of systems. And then finally, we might have to do environmental protection. So, the bare essentials plus those five optional elements are the ones that we will look at.

The Essentials #1

Let’s start with the essentials. I’m going to say it’s axiomatic – that every program needs these three tasks. It needs Preliminary Hazard Identification. It needs Preliminary Hazard Analysis. And it needs System Requirements Hazard Analysis. The last one is about identifying safety requirements for the system.

Now, that’s a very bold statement, is it for me to say you must have these elements in every safety program? Let me justify that, first of all, before I explain it a little bit in the next slide.

The first thing to note is that you can do these tasks early on. They are quick and cheap tasks if you do them early enough. If you do them early enough, it’s low granularity. So, it can be a quick and simple analysis. And because of that, it’s cheap. But don’t let that fool you! Getting in early and thinking about Risk early gives us valuable insight. Insight that we can then take action on. So we get actionable results early enough in the program to do something about it if we do it.

The second point to note with these three is that every other task depends on their outputs. Indeed, if you’re going to successfully tailor a safety program, you need the output from these tasks. They will help you focus on what’s important and what’s less important.

Thirdly, from experience, almost every program suffers from not doing these three tasks. Whether that be well enough, early enough, or both. I’ve never been on a program where we said, ‘We did too much Preliminary Hazard Identification Analysis!’. Nor ‘We did too much identification of safety requirements!’. That has never, ever happened in more than 20 years of experience working on safety programs.

It’s always been the opposite. We wish we’d done more. We wish we’d gone in earlier with these tasks. Then we would have known something that would have helped us to make sensible decisions. Ultimately, it would have saved a lot of time and money too! Think of these essentials as an investment, because that’s what they are…

This is Module 4 of SSRAP

This is Module 4 of the System Safety Risk Assessment Program (SSRAP) Course. Risk Analysis Programs – Design a System Safety Program for any system in any application.

The full course comprises 15 lessons and 1.5 hours of video content, plus resources. It’s on pre-sale at HALF PRICE until September 1st, 2024. Check out all the free preview videos here and order using the coupon “Pre-order-Half-Price-SSRAP”. But don’t leave it too long because there are only 100 half-price courses available!

Meet the Author

Learn safety engineering with me, an industry professional with 25 years of experience, I have:

•Worked on aircraft, ships, submarines, ATMS, trains, and software;

•Tiny programs to some of the biggest (Eurofighter, Future Submarine);

•In the UK and Australia, on US and European programs;

•Taught safety to hundreds of people in the classroom, and thousands online;

•Presented on safety topics at several international conferences.

Categories
Blog Mil-Std-882E

Environmental Hazard Analysis

This is the full-length (one hour) session on Environmental Hazard Analysis (EHA), which is Task 210 in Mil-Std-882E. I explore the aim, task description, and contracting requirements of this Task, but this is only half the video. In the commentary, I then look at environmental requirements in the USA, UK, and Australia, before examining how to apply EHA in detail under the Australian/international regime. This uses my practical experience of applying EHA. 

You Will Learn to:

  • Conduct EHA according to the standard;
  • Record EHA results correctly;
  • Contract for EHA successfully;
  • Be aware of the regulatory scene in the US, UK, and Australia;
  • Appreciate the complexities of conducting EHA in Australia; and
  • Recognize when your EHA program requires specialist support.
This is the seven-minute demo of the full-length (one hour) session on Environmental Hazard Analysis.

Topics: Environmental Hazard Analysis

  • Environmental Hazard Analysis (EHA) Purpose;
  • Task Description (7+ slides);
  • Documentation, HAZMAT & Contracting (2 slides each);
  • Commentary (8 slides); and
  • Conclusion.

Transcript: Environmental Hazard Analysis

Introduction

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Safety Artisan. Today, we’re going to be talking about Environmental Hazard Analysis – A big topic! And I’m covering this as part of the series on the System Safety Engineering Standard – Mil. Standard 882E. But it doesn’t really matter what standard we are using the topic is still relevant.

Environmental Hazard Analysis is a big topic because we’ll cover everything, not just hazards. At the end of this session, you should be able to enjoy three benefits. First of all, you should know how to approach Environmental hazard analysis from:

  • The point of view of the requirements,
  • The Hazard Analysis itself (the process), and
  • Some national and international variations in the English-speaking world.

So, you should know how to do the basics and also to recognize when maybe you need to bring in a specialist.

But maybe most important of all, number three is you should have the confidence to be able to get started. So I’m hoping that this session is really going to help you get started, know what you can do, and then maybe recognize when you need to bring in some specialist help or go and seek some further information.

As you’ll see, it’s a big, complex subject. I can get you started today, but that’s all I can do in one session. And in fact, I think that’s all anyone can do in one session. Anyway, let’s get on with it and see what we’ve got.

Environmental Hazard Analysis, Mil-Std-882E Task 210

Environmental Hazard Analysis, which is Task 210 under Mil. Standard 882E. So let’s look at what we’re going to talk about today.

Topics for this Session

And you’ll see why it’s going to be quite a lengthy session. I think it will last an hour because we’re going to go through the Purpose and Task Description of Environmental Hazard Analysis as set out in the Mil. Standard. And it says seven-plus slides because there are seven mainstream slides plus some illustrations in there as well. Then we’ve got a couple of slides each on Documentation, Hazardous Materials or HAZMAT, and Contracting. Then eight slides of Commentary and this is the major value add because I’ll be talking about applying Environmental Hazard Analysis in a US, UK, and Australian jurisdiction under the different laws, which I have some experience of.

I worked closely with environmental specialists on the Eurofighter Typhoon project, and I’ve also worked closely with the same specialists on US programs which had been bought by different countries. And then finally, I’ve been closely involved in a major environmental – or safety and environmental – project here in Australia. So I’ve been exposed and learned the hard way about how things work or don’t work here in Australia. So I’ve got some relevant experience to share with you, as well as some learned material to share with you. And then a little Conclusion, because I say this will take us an hour so there’s quite a lot of material to cover. So, let’s get right on with it.

EHA

So the purpose of Environmental Hazards Analysis, or EHA, as it says, is to support design development decisions. Now all of the 882 tasks are meant to do this, but actually, the wording in Task 210 is the clearest of all of them. Really makes it explicit what we’re trying to do, which is excellent.

So we’re going to identify hazards throughout the life cycle – cradle to grave, whatever system it is. We’re going to document and record those hazards and their leading particulars within the Hazard Tracking System or Hazard Log, as we more often call it. We’re going to manage the hazards using the same system safety process in Section Four as we use for safety. This is the process that you will have heard in the other lessons that I’ve given. And very often under 882, Safety and Environmental Hazards are considered together. There are pros and cons with that approach, but nevertheless, a lot of the work is common. We’ll see why later on.

In this American standard, it says we are to provide specific data to support the National Environmental Policy Act and executive order requirements. So the NEPA is an American piece of legislation and therefore I use this color blue to indicate anything that’s an American-specific requirement. So if you’re not operating in America, you’ll need to find the equivalent to manage to and to comply with. Moving on…

…see the full transcript here (TBD).

Links: Environmental Hazard Analysis

The links mentioned in the video are here:

You can find a free pdf of the System Safety Engineering Standard, Mil-Std-882E, here.

Meet the Author

Learn safety engineering with me, an industry professional with 25 years of experience, I have:

•Worked on aircraft, ships, submarines, ATMS, trains, and software;

•Tiny programs to some of the biggest (Eurofighter, Future Submarine);

•In the UK and Australia, on US and European programs;

•Taught safety to hundreds of people in the classroom, and thousands online;

•Presented on safety topics at several international conferences.