Saturday, September 19, 2015

Ideal Characteristics for Safety-Critical Projects

Safety is the most important focus, investment, ideal, culture, policy, and practice that an aviation company can have.  It is often the leading core value, specialization, or mission for an aviation firm.  Day-to-day operations are guided by safety policy, practices and procedures designed to eliminate preventable occurrences, incidents, and OSHA recordables.  They are designed to bring home your husband, your friend, and your colleague.  What about non routine events?  What about planning a project where safety is also of the utmost importance?  Fiona Saunders, in the June/July 2015 Project Management Journal publication, suggests that project planning and management can borrow concepts and characteristics from safety-oriented industries to build a framework for delivering successful safety-critical projects.

Definitions:

Safety-critical – a project or task that is described as safety-critical is one that places safety as the highest prioritized objective.  Cost, time, resources used, these aspects are secondary.
High reliability – a characteristic describing a consistently safe performance in operating environments of high technical complexity, high consequence, and high tempo.

Saunders begins by acknowledging the differences between daily operations and projects and concluding that they are similar enough to warrant the application of her suggested theories.   A portion of the differences in characteristics include permanent and continuous vs transient and temporary, tried and tested technology vs unique or novelty, and a focus on stability vs focus on implementation of change.  A few similarities include consequences of failure are high, safety is overarching priority, highly complex socio-technological systems, and underpinned by key processes.  Research from the U.S. air traffic control system, the nuclear industry, and flight operations aboard two U.S. navy aircraft carriers provide the basis for the potential lessons learned.

An analysis of how high reliability industries support safety-critical operations is presented and there are five main organizational characters found to exist.  The first is clarity of objectives and includes a sense of mission, effective communications, safety as a number one priority, and safety is incentivized.  Strong organizational culture is the second and includes a learning culture, reliability culture, trusting culture, techno/professional culture, and organizational hubris and complacency are challenged.  A presence of redundancy and slack is next, to include redundancy in design, operating equipment and procedures, and conceptual slack (nurture a tolerance for different perspectives and foster skepticism and doubt).  Mindfulness is another key which includes a preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify interpretations, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and an under-specification of structures.  The final characteristic is an ability to prosper in the paradoxes which means decision making that is both centralized and decentralized, processes that are abandoned in urgent situations, and processing multiple interpretations of events and yet not being paralyzed by analysis.  For each characteristic, hypothesized observable practices that could take place in high reliability project organizing are also given.

 To give just one example of an observable practice, it is suggested that areas of ignorance in the project are given the same importance as areas of certainty.  This practice is found in the strong organizational culture characteristic and in my opinion, translates into a thorough risk management plan.  A culture where team members are encouraged to vet out deviations of the plan or which areas might fail requires an environment where speaking of potential problems and issues is encouraged, not diminished.  This is an important distinction because I have experienced culture where suggesting that possible failure translated into me being insubordinate or not a “team-player.”  Treating project members this way will prevent areas of ignorance or potential risk from being mentioned at all.  Such a culture goes against basic safety principles and would certainly not contribute toward a high reliability project.

Reference
Saunders, Fiona C. (June/July 2015). Toward high reliability project organizing in safety-critical projects.  Project Management Journal, volume 46(3). Retrieved from http://www.pmi.org/~/media/Members/Publications/PMJ_v46_JUNJUL_LowRes_locked.ashx