In ‘Reflections on a Career in Safety, Part 3’ I continue talking about different kinds of Safety, moving onto…

Projects and Products

Then moving on to the project side, where teams of people were making sure a new aeroplane, a new radio, a new whatever it might be, was going to work in service; people were going to be able to use it, easily, support it, get it replaced or repaired if they had to. So it was a much more technical job – so lots of software, lots of people, lots of process and more people.

Moving to the software team was a big shock to me. It was accidental. It wasn’t a career move that I had chosen, but I enjoyed it when I got there.  For everything else in the Air Force, there was a rule. There was a process for doing this. There were rules for doing that. Everything was nailed down. When I went to the software team, I discovered there are no rules in software, there are only opinions.

So straight away, it became a very people-focused job because if you didn’t know what you were doing, then you were a bit stuck.  I had to go through a learning curve, along with every other technician who was on the team. And the thing about software with it being intangible is that it becomes all about the process. If a physical piece of kit like the display screen isn’t working, it’s pretty obvious. It’s black, it’s blank, nothing is happening. It’s not always obvious that you’ve done something wrong with software when you’re developing it.

So we were very heavily reliant on process; again, people have got to decide what’s the right process for this job? What are we going to do? Who’s going to do it? Who’s able to do it? And it was interesting to suddenly move into this world where there were no rules and where there were some prima donnas.

We had a handful of really good programmers who could do just about anything with the aeroplane, and you had to make the best use of them without letting them get out of control.  Equally, you had people on the other end of the scale who’d been posted into the software team, who really did not want to be there. They wanted to get their hands dirty, fixing aeroplanes. That’s what they wanted to do. Interesting times.

From the software team, I moved on to big projects like Eurofighter, that’s when I got introduced to:

Systems Engineering

And I have no problem with plugging systems engineering because as a safety engineer, I know [that] if there is good systems engineering and good project management, I know my job is going to be so much easier. I’ve turned up on a number of projects as a consultant or whatever, and I say, OK, where’s the safety plan? And they say, oh, we want you to write it. OK, yeah, I can do that. Whereas the project management plan or where’s the systems engineering management plan?

If there isn’t one or it’s garbage – as it sometimes is – I’m sat there going, OK, my just my job just got ten times harder, because safety is an emergent property. So you can say a piece of kit is on or off. You can say it’s reliable, but you can’t tell whether it’s safe until you understand the context. What are you asking it to do in what environment? So unless you have something to give you that wider and bigger picture and put some discipline on the complexity, it’s very hard to get a good result.

So systems engineering is absolutely key, and I’m always glad to work with the good systems engineer and all the artifacts that they’ve produced. That’s very important. So clarity in your documentation is very helpful. Being [involved], if you’re lucky, at the very beginning of a program, you’ve got an opportunity to design safety, and all the other qualities you want, into your product. You’ve got an opportunity to design in that stuff from the beginning and make sure it’s there, right there in the requirements.

Also, systems engineers doing the requirements, working out what needs to be done, what you need the product to do, and just as importantly, what you need it not to do, and then passing that on down the chain. That’s very important. And I put in the title “managing at a distance” because, unlike in the operations world where you can say “that’s broken, can you please go and fix it”.

Managing at a Distance

It’s not as direct as that.  You’re looking at your process, you’re looking at the documentation, you’re working with, again, lots and lots of people, not all of whom have the same motivation that you do.

Industry wants to get paid. They want to do the minimum work to get paid, [in order] to maximize their profit. You want the best product you can get. The pilots want something that punches holes in the sky and looks flash and they don’t really care much about much else, because they’re quite inoculated to risk.

So you’ve got people with competing motivations and everything has got to be worked indirectly. You don’t get to control things directly. You’ve got to try and influence and put good things in place, in almost an act of faith that, [you put] good things in place and good things will result.  A good process will produce a good product. And most of the time that’s true. So (my last slide on work), I ended up doing consultancy, first internally and then externally.

Part 4 will follow next week!

New to System Safety? Then start here. There’s more about The Safety Artisan here. Subscribe for free regular emails here.

In ‘Reflections on a Career in Safety, Part 2’ I move on to …

Different Kinds of Safety

So I’m going to talk a little bit about highlights, that I hope you’ll find useful.  I went straight from university into the Air Force and went from this kind of [academic] environment to heavy metal, basically.  I guess it’s obvious that wherever you are if you’re doing anything in industry, workplace health and safety is important because you can hurt people quite quickly. 

Workplace Health and Safety

In my very first job, we had people doing welding, high voltage electrics, heavy mechanical things; all [the equipment was] built out of centimeter-thick steel. It was tough stuff and people still managed to bend it. So the amount of energy that was rocking around there, you could very easily hurt people.  Even the painters – that sounds like a safe job, doesn’t it? – but aircraft paint at that time a cyanoacrylate. It was a compound of cyanide that we used to paint aeroplanes with.

All the painters and finishers had to wear head-to-toe protective equipment and breathing apparatus. If you’re giving people air to breathe, if you get that wrong, you can hurt people quite quickly. So even managing the hazards of the workplace introduced further hazards that all had to be very carefully controlled.

And because you’re in operations, all the decisions about what kind of risks and hazards you’re going to face, they’ve already been made long before.  Decisions that were made years ago, when a new plane or ship or whatever it was, was being bought and being introduced [into service]. Decisions made back then, sometimes without realizing it, meant that we were faced with handling certain hazards and you couldn’t get rid of them. You just had to manage them as best you could.

Overall, I think we did pretty well. Injuries were rare, despite the very exciting things that we were dealing with sometimes.  We didn’t have too many near misses – not that we heard about anyway. Nevertheless, that [risk] was always there in the background. You’re always trying to control these things and stop them from getting out of control.

One of the things about a workplace in operations and support, whether you’re running a fleet of aeroplanes or you’re servicing some kit for somebody else and then returning it to them, it tends to be quite a people-centric job. So, large groups of people doing the job, supervision, organization, all that kind of stuff.  And that can all seem very mundane, a lot of HR-type stuff. But it’s important and it’s got to be dealt with.

So the real world of managing people is a lot of logistics. Making sure that everybody you need is available to do the work, making sure that they’ve got all the kit, all the technical publications that tell them what to do, the information that they need.  It’s very different to university – a lot of seemingly mundane stuff – but it’s got to be got right because the consequences of stuffing up can be quite serious.

Safe Systems of Work

So moving on to some slightly different topics, when I got onto working with Aeroplanes, there was an emphasis on a safe system of work, because doing maintenance on a very complex aeroplane was quite an involved process and it had to be carefully controlled. So we would have what’s usually referred to as a Permit to Work system where you very tightly control what people are allowed to do to any particular plane. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a plane or a big piece of mining equipment or you’re sending people in to do maintenance on infrastructure; whatever it might be, you’ve got to make sure that the power is disconnected before people start pulling it apart, et cetera, et cetera.

And then when you put it back together again, you’ve got to make sure that there aren’t any bits leftover and everything works before you hand it back to the operators because they’re going to go and do some crazy stuff with it. You want to make sure that the plane works properly. So there was an awful lot of process in that. And in those days, it was a paperwork process. These days, I guess a lot would be computerized, but it’s still the same process.

If you muck up the process, it doesn’t matter whether [it is paper-based or not].  If you’ve got a rubbish process, you’re going to get rubbish results and it [computerization] doesn’t change that. You just stuff up more quickly because you’ve got a more powerful tool. And for certain things we had to take, I’ve called it special measures. In my case, we were a strike squadron, which meant our planes would carry nuclear weapons if they had to.

Special Processes for Special Risks

So if the Soviets charged across the border with 20,000 tanks and we couldn’t stop them, then it was time to use – we called them buckets of sunshine. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Anyway, so there were some fairly particular processes and rules for looking after buckets of sunshine. And I’m glad to say we only ever used dummies. But when you when the convoy arrived and yours truly has to sign for the weapon and then the team starts loading it, then that does concentrate your mind as an engineer. I think I was twenty-two, twenty-three at the time.  

Somebody on [our Air Force] station stuffed up on the paperwork and got caught. So that was two careers of people my age, who I knew, that were destroyed straight away, just by not being too careful about what they were doing. So, yeah, that does concentrate the mind.  If you’re dealing with, let’s say you’re in a major hazard facility, you’re in a chemical plant where you’ve got perhaps thousands of tonnes of dangerous chemicals, there are some very special risk controls, which you have to make sure are going to work most of the time.

And finally, there is ‘airworthiness’: decisions about whether we could fly an aeroplane, even though some bits of it were not working. So that was a decision that I got to make once I got signed off to do it. But it’s a team job. You talk to the specialists who say, this bit of the aeroplane isn’t working, but it doesn’t matter as long as you don’t do “that”.

So you have to make sure that the pilots knew, OK, this isn’t working.  This is the practical effect from your [operator’s] point of view. So you don’t switch this thing on or rely on this thing working because it isn’t going to work. There were various decisions about [airworthiness] that were an exciting part of the job, which I really enjoyed.  That’s when you had to understand what you were doing, not on your own, because there were people who’d been there a lot longer than me.  But we had to make things work as best we could – that was life.

Part 3 will follow next week!

New to System Safety? Then start here. There’s more about The Safety Artisan here. Subscribe for free regular emails here.

This is Part 1 of my ‘Reflections on a Career in Safety’, from “Safety for Systems Engineering and Industry Practice”, a lecture that I gave to the University of Adelaide in May 2021. My thanks to Dr. Kim Harvey for inviting me to do this and setting it up.

The Lecture, Part 1

Hi, everyone, my name Simon Di Nucci and I’m an engineer, I actually – it sounds cheesy – but I got into safety by accident. We’ll talk about that later. I was asked to talk a little bit about career stuff, some reflections on quite a long career in safety, engineering, and other things, and then some stuff that hopefully you will find interesting and useful about safety work in industry and working for government.

Context: my Career Summary

I’ve got three areas to talk about, operations and support, projects and product development, and consulting.

I have been on some very big projects, Eurofighter, Future Submarine Programme, and some others that have been huge multi-billion-dollar programs, but also some quite small ones as well. They’re just as interesting, sometimes more so. In the last few years, I’ve been working in consultancy. I have some reflections on those topics and some brief reflections on a career in safety.

Starting Out in the Air Force

So a little bit about my career to give you some context. I did 20 years in the Royal Air Force in the U.K., as you can tell from my accent, I’m not from around here. I started off fresh out of university, with a first degree in aerospace systems engineering. And then after my Air Force training, my first job was as an engineering manager on ground support equipment: in General Engineering Flight, it was called.

We had people looking after the electrical and hydraulic power rigs that the aircraft needed to be maintained on the ground. And we had painters and finishers and a couple of carpenters and a fabric worker and some metal workers and welders, that kind of stuff. So I went from a university where we were learning about all this high-tech stuff about what was yet to come in the aerospace industry. It was a bit of the opposite end to go to, a lot of heavy mechanical engineering that was quite simple.

And then after that, we had a bit of excitement because six weeks after I started, in my very first job, the Iraqis invaded Kuwait.  I didn’t go off to war, thank goodness, but some of my people did. We all got ready for that: a bit of excitement.

After that, I did a couple of years on a squadron, on the front line. We were maintaining and fixing the aeroplanes and looking after operations. And then from there, I went for a complete change. Actually, I did three years on a software maintenance team and that was a very different job, which I’ll talk about later. I had the choice of two unpleasant postings that I really did not want, or I could go to the software maintenance team.

Into Software by accident as well!

I discovered a burning passion to do software to avoid going to these other places. And that’s how I ended up there. I had three, fantastic years there and really enjoyed that. Then, I was thinking of going somewhere down south to be in the UK, to be near family, but we went further north. That’s the way things happen in the military.

I got taken on as the rather grandly titled Systems and Software Specialist Officer on the Typhoon Field Team. The Eurofighter Typhoon wasn’t in service at that point. (That didn’t come in until 2003 when I was in my last Air Force job, actually.)  We had a big team of handpicked people who were there to try and make sure that the aircraft was supportable when it came into service.

One of the big things about the new aircraft was it had tons of software on board.  There were five million lines of code on board, which was a lot at the time, and a vast amount of data. It was a data hog; it ate vast amounts of data and it produced vast amounts of data and that all needed to be managed. It was on a scale beyond anything we’d seen before. So it was a big shock to the Air Force.

More Full-time Study

Then after that, I was very fortunate.  (This is a picture of York, with the minister in the background.) I spent a year full-time doing the safety-critical systems engineering course at York, which was excellent.  It was a privilege to be able to have a year to do that full-time. I’ve watched a lot of people study part-time when they’ve got a job and a family, and it’s really tough. So I was very, very pleased that I got to do that.

After that, I went to do another software job where this time we were in a small team and we were trying to drive software supportability into new projects coming into service, all kinds of stuff, mainly aircraft, but also other things as well.  That was almost like an internal consultancy job. The only difference was we were free, which you would think would make it easier to sell our services. But the opposite is the case.

Finally, in my last Air Force job, I was part of the engineering authority looking after the Typhoon aircraft as it came into service, which is always a fun time. We just got the plane into service. And then one of the boxes that I was responsible for malfunctioned. So the undercarriage refused to come down on the plane, which is not what you want. We did it did get down safely in the end, but then the whole fleet was grounded and we had to fix the problem. So some more excitement there. Not always of the kind that you want, but there we go. So that took me up to 2006.

At that point, I transitioned out of the Air Force and I became a consultant

So, I always regarded consultants with a bit of suspicion up until then, and now I am one. I started off with a firm called QinetiQ, which is also over here. And I was doing safety mainly with the aviation team. But again, we did all sorts, vehicles, ships, network logistics stuff, all kinds of things. And then in 2012, I joined Frazer-Nash in order to come to Australia.

So we appeared in Australia in November 2012. And we’ve been here in Adelaide all almost all that time. And you can’t get rid of us now because we’re citizens. So you’re stuck with us. But it’s been lovely. We love Adelaide and really enjoy, again, the varied work here.

Part 2 will follow next week!

New to System Safety? Then start here. There’s more about The Safety Artisan here. Subscribe for free regular emails here.