Fishbone diagrams are perhaps the best risk management tool in aviation safety management systems (SMS) for gaining a comprehensive understanding of root causes of safety incidents.
A fishbone diagram derives its name from its fishlike appearance, with a head of several fins.
Each “fin” or “branch” of a fishbone diagram describes a different category of the situation, such as the categories “Human” or “Machine.” The head of the fishbone describes the risk.
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
One of the most ubiquitous problems in aviation risk management is the misuse of commonly used words, in particular “hazard” and “risk.” Often, these two items are either:
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
Control measures are the heart of your aviation safety management system’s (SMS) risk mitigation efforts. You may call your "control measures" either:
In this article, we'll use the term "control measures," but I am sure many of you call them "risk controls." Either term is permissible; however, I'm detecting a global preference in the aviation industry for the term "risk control."
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Repeat safety incidents are extremely indicative of management’s safety performance in mitigating safety concerns.
Having repeat safety incidents is clear evidence that management is “missing” or “overlooking” something when they are correcting reported safety concerns. This is bad for safety performance, and it’s bad for audit performance.
On the other hand, the lack of repeat incidents indicates that whatever you are doing to mitigate safety concerns, it’s working. The most important factors in mitigating safety concerns are:
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
Healthy aviation safety management systems (SMS) rely upon hazard reporting to reduce operational risk. High-performing safety reporting cultures receive approximately one report for every ten employees each month.
When safety managers have poor hazard reporting cultures, they have a more difficult time justifying aviation safety budgets. Furthermore, their collected data is skewed and inaccurate and basically useless for responsible decision-making.
Topics: 1-Safety Policy
If you put 10 safety managers in a room and asked them what root cause analysis was, they would have ten different answers.
Safety professionals all say that they perform root cause analysis at some time during their risk management process. In their minds, that’s probably true.
But root cause analysis for one safety manager would not necessarily be the root cause analysis for another manager.
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
During the risk management process in an aviation safety management system (SMS), one of the expected tasks is to analyze the risk of hazards associated with
When you perform risk analysis on whatever type of a safety issue in aviation SMS, your goal is to understand how and why the underlying issue affects risk exposure in your organization.
Topics: Risk Management Training
This article is originally inspired by a rather insightful video discussing the interplay between safety management and quality assurance.
A management system is a set of processes used to manage “findings” during operations.
“Findings” are simply things you discover in your operations that are less than ideal. We can also call findings “issues.” There can be many types of issues, such as:
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
When you identify a hazard within your organization, the first step is to analyze the risk. If the risk is high, then you need a control measure to reduce risk to acceptable levels.
Any change made to the existing system to reduce risk is a control measure.
Control measures can be simple or complex. Using a less hazardous chemical might be a simple control. Designing and installing a new ventilation system would be more complicated.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Accuracy is extremely important.
Much of the bureaucracy of safety management systems depend on correct and specific understanding of safety concepts. Misunderstanding definitions in SMS is synonymous with misunderstanding what a safety element is and can compromise how that safety element is:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
These two on-demand videos offer:
