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
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