Do the right job, then do the job right.

Abstract Accepted....

When you put an abstract in for a conference, you are never really sure how it's going to be received.  So when you get an email back from the IChemE saying "your abstract has been accepted", there are two emotions at the same time: the first is that you are delighted that what you thought might be important to talk about has been accepted, the second is the realisation that now you have to turn a 250 word abstract into a 2-3,000 word paper!  The deadline is 16 Jan 2016, and the prize is to speak at the IChemE Hazards 26 conference in Edinburgh, May 2016.

It's not that bad actually....

In this case, it's not actually that bad, as the topic is one close to my heart, and that I and the teams I work with have been dealing with for a number of years.  The full title of what we're talking about this time is "Do the Right Job, then Do the Job Right - Dealing with Process Safety in Appraise and Select."  We've assisted a number of companies with this, from the basics of carrying out small assessments to determine what a job entails and how much it might cost, through to re-engineering company management of change programmes to embed the assessment in the way that things are done.

What I plan to have in the paper....

The paper will address process safety in two ways:

1. How can you deal with jobs that provide risk improvement, and compare those to jobs which may increase revenue, reduce downtime, reduce environmental or business risk?
2. How can you make decisions on the process safety aspects of a job at the appraise stage, where there is limited time and the design concept may not be much more than a proposal, rather than a design?

Item 1 will deal with what we refer to as "inappropriate prioritisation".  This includes things like:

• Prioritisation by who shouts the loudest
• Prioritisation by deferring to the most senior person in the discussion
• Prioritisation by creative/spurious use of the word "safety"
• etc,

It will also talk about the difficulties whereby it can be tempting to have a set of ranked lists of projects, and doing the top n of each one until the money runs out.  The topic of "ALARP", and how this useful concept in UK style safety law can be difficult to apply in other regions of the world, is likely to figure. 

Item 2 will deal more with the challenges of early hazard identification, and dealing with "Management of Change" as defined by the CCPS, as "not UNKNOWINGLY introducing new hazards or making existing hazards worse".  This will address both design for risk reduction, and assessment of other design for risk aspects.

What won't be in the paper....

We will be drawing on experience of many companies across the globe.  We won't be mentioning any specific installation, and any examples quoted will only be identifiable if you already know the job and installation.

How you might help....

I'd be delighted to get a bit of input from anyone who is interested in this topic.  Any wider perspective, be that from inside or outside the UK, inside or outside of the EU, inside or outside of the oil and gas industry, would be excellent.  Please contact me, preferably via LinkedIn, if you're interested.  I'll happily share my thoughts in development, and return any favours I can.

Thanks in advance....

Like a boxed set, only better

I'm not sure when box sets went from being something you bought as a present on Father's Day to being the way that people consume TV, but it's clearly happened.  If it's not "Game of Thrones", it's a new comedy, or a new murder thriller series from Scandinavia. 

The adverts on the TV all seem to imply that the best way is to pick a boxed set, and then binge-watch until you have caught up.  Which is how I think I am currently treating a great resource recommended to me by Richard Cousins at BP. 

It's called "DisasterCast", and is a podcast series by Drew Rae, (see http://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-humanities/staff/drew-rae).  I've listened to maybe twenty of these so far, and they are uniformly excellent, thought provoking, and informative.  I've mentioned them to a few colleagues, but am clearly ahead of them so far in my listening.  I know I'll be liberally quoting from his thoughts from now on.

The podcasts are available http://disastercast.co.uk/, and can be downloaded on all major podcast software, including iTunes.

If BBC Radio 4 describes itself as "broadsheet radio", then this is "broadsheet safety broadcasting".  Simply superb.

What Ancient Troy has to do with Safety.

I had the joy of studying Latin in school, and a lot of what we studied revolved around the stories of Troy, the foundation of Rome, the various Gods, and their dealings with the mortals.  One character that always stood out to me was Cassandra, sister of Paris, the Prince of Troy who steals Helen as his bride and brings about the 10 year war.  Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by the God Apollo, but in one version of the story, she then could foresee the fall of Troy, and fell out with Apollo.  He in turn was not allowed to take back the gift, but rather changed it so she would be still able to foretell the future, just that nobody would believe her.

"What has this to do with offshore safety?", you might ask.  Well, we are now in a challenging, cost-focused environment (again).  And there will be significant pressure to reduce workload offshore, (again).  And there will be temptation to trim back to the bare minimum again.

The Chair of the HSE, Judith Hackitt, summarised it well in her guest editorial in "The Chemical Engineer", the journal of the Institution of Chemical Engineers of which she was president up to last year.  The full text is available here.

She is pointing out that we've been here before.  We got it wrong before.  And it's entirely foreseeable that we will get it wrong again, if we focus ONLY on the cost, and not on the risk.  And while most people will not actively cause harm, it's entirely foreseeable that poor decisions we take now, or even postpone for now, will cause delayed harm to our colleagues at the work-face.

If safety is a core value for our companies, like the words on the wall might say, we need to demonstrate that as much now as in the better times.  The point of principles is that they should guide how we behave when it is not easy to stick to them.  Let us not be like Cassandra, and see the needless loss of what we and others hold dear.