Safety Assurance

Where are we now?

Performance prediction has difficulties

Safety Culture has problems with officialdom

Some possibilities and their relationship

Some candidate indicators are:

• The 'three P's' of Product, Performance and Process characteristics,

• Compliance with Regulations,

• The extent to which best practice methods are being followed,

• Organisational characteristics such as safety culture,

• The vigour (and rigour) of risk management,

• The quality of design decision making.

Principles, Design and Management

Some suggested principles for principles:

• They need to be manageable (not too many)

• They are probably best as a hierarchy

• An explicit set of roles for users (or at least operators) may be useful

• Splitting design and management principles may be best

• Achievement of management principles can be accomplished by Process Capability Evaluation

Assurance at a management level

Assurance at a working level

The use of a process-based approach would:

• Allow safety to take advantage of Off The Shelf (OTS) assessment methods, tools etc.

• Permit integration with other assessments, including assessment of human-system issues, system engineering processes and software engineering processes.

• Provide an OTS framework for Process Improvement.

• (Arguably) provide a more systematic and rigorous approach to assessment.

In summary, we need both design principles and process specifications,
but
indicators from design principles are lagged, dependent indicators, placing greater weight on the role of process indicators for safety assurance.

On to Conclusions