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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
Mil-Std-882E Safety Analysis

Preliminary Hazard Identification with Mil-Std-882E

Want to know how to perform Preliminary Hazard Identification with Mil-Std-882E? (This is Task 201 under the standard.)

This is the first step in safety assessment.  We look at three classic complementary techniques to identify hazards and their pros and cons.  This includes all the content from Task 201, and also practical insights from my 25 years of experience with Mil-Std-882. 

You Will Learn to:

  • Conduct Preliminary Hazard Identification using diverse techniques for best results;
  • Define what Preliminary Hazard Identification is and does;
  • Record Preliminary Hazard Identification results correctly;
  • Contract for Preliminary Hazard Identification successfully; and
  • Apply it early enough to make a difference.
This is the seven-minute-long demo video.

Topics: Preliminary Hazard Identification with Mil-Std-882E

  • Task 201 Purpose & Task Description;
  • Historical Review;
  • Recording Results;
  • Contracting; and
  • Commentary:
    • Historical Data;
    • Hazard Checklists; and
    • Analysis Techniques.

Transcript: Preliminary Hazard Identification

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Safety Artisan, where you will find instructional materials that are professional, pragmatic, and impartial because we don’t have anything to sell, and we don’t have an axe to grind. Let’s look at what we’re doing today, which is Preliminary Hazard Identification. We are looking at one of the first actual analysis tasks in Mil-Std-882E, which is a systems safety engineering standard from the US government, and it’s typically used on military systems, but it does turn up elsewhere.

Preliminary Hazard ID is Task 201

I’m recording this on the 2nd of February 2020, however, the Mil-Std has been in existence since May 2012 and it is still current, it looks like it is sticking around for quite a while, and this lesson isn’t likely to go out of date anytime soon.

Topics for this session

What we’re going to cover is, quoting from the task, first of all, we’re going to look at the purpose and the task description, where the task talks quite a lot about historical review (I think we’ve got three slides of that), recording results, putting stuff in contracts and then I’m adding some commentary of my own. I will be commenting all the way through, that’s the value add, that’s why I’m doing this, but then there’s some specific extra information that I think you will find helpful, should you need to implement Task 201. In this session, we’ve moved up one level from awareness and we are now looking at practice, at being equipped to actually perform safety jobs, to do safety tasks.

Preliminary Hazard Identification (T201)

The purpose of Task 201 is to compile a list of potential hazards early in development. two things to note here: it is only a list, it’s very preliminary. I’ll keep coming back to that, this is important. Remember, this is the very first thing we do that’s an analytical task. There are planning tasks in the 100 series, but actually, some of them depend on you doing Task 201 because you can’t work out how are you going to manage something until you’ve got some idea of what you’re dealing with. We’ll come back to that in later lessons.

It is a list of potential hazards that we’re after, and we’re trying to do it early in development. And I really can’t overemphasize how important it is to do these things early in development, because we need to do some work early on in order to set expectations, in order to set budgets, in order to set requirements and to basically get a grip, get some scope on what we think we might be doing for the rest of the program. this is a really important task and it should be done as early as possible, and it’s okay to do it several times. Because it’s an early task it should be quick, it should be fairly cheap. We should be doing it just as soon as we can when we’re at the conceptual stage when we don’t even have a proper set of requirements and then we redo it thereafter maybe. And maybe different organizations will do it for themselves and pass the information on to others. And we’ll talk about that later as well.

Task Description

This is the task description. It says the contractor shall – actually forget about who’s supposed to do it, lots of people could and should be doing this as part of their project management or program management risk reduction because as I said, this is fundamental to what we’re doing for the rest of the safety program and indeed maybe the whole project itself. So, what we need to do is “examine the system shortly after the material solution analysis begins and compile a Preliminary Hazard List (PHL) identifying potential hazards inherent in the concept”. That’s what the standard actually says.

A couple of things to note here. Saying that you start doing it after material solution analysis has begun might be read as implying you don’t do it until after you finish doing the requirements, and I think that’s wrong, I think that’s far too late. To my mind, that is not the correct interpretation. Indeed, if we look at the last four words in the definition, it says we’re “identifying potential hazards inherent in the concept”. That, I think, gives us the correct steer. we’ve got a concept, maybe not even a full set of requirements, what are the hazards associated with that concept, with that scope? And I think that’s a good way to look at it.

Historical Review

This task places a great deal of emphasis on the review of historical documentation, and specifically on reviewing documentation with similar and legacy systems. an old system, a legacy system that we are maybe replacing with this system but there might be other legacy systems around. We need to look at those systems. The assumption is that we actually have some data from similar and legacy systems. And that’s a key weakness really with this, is that we’re assuming that we can get hold of that data. But I’ll talk about the issues with that when I get to my commentary at the end.

We need to look at the following…

End: Preliminary Hazard Identification with Mil-Std-882E

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.