Published Articles
How to Manage Risks with Chronic Unease
When making everyday decisions, we rarely have all the information available. Sometimes, we deal with ambiguous information, so we may rely on assumptions. When managing safety, making sense of unclear and ambiguous information can be critical.
In this blog post, I will discuss chronic unease as a mindset that can support managers in dealing with vague and unclear information in their decision-making.
Australia Airports Build: The Other End of the Line
The focus of post 2 of this series was the pressure currently being placed on the Brisbane Airport in Australia, in part, from a type of mining operation known as FIFO. Obviously, for the FIFO concept to work there need to be airports at the other end of the sector and that is the topic of this post.
As introduced, FIFO (Fly-In-Fly-Out) is a resourcing tool for remote and regional mine sites to staff their operations from larger population bases and locations offering a better lifestyle.
Performance: Going for the Deep Dive
In this series’s previous post, I discussed the identification of critical controls in the service of a fully-functioning airport (or anything for that matter) safety assurance, but that is not the end of the story.
The point of having these critical controls is to provide your organisation with an account of how it manages risk.
The role of the Accountable Executive, supported by their subordinates, is to be in a position to provide that account and to ensure that it aligns with the organisation’s strategy and objectives, or vice versa.
There may be some discussion on the level to which this account should reach but the following article outlines what is thought to be an effective and achievable middle ground.
Critical Controls: What Keeps You Up at Night?
Today's post on safety assurance will focus on identifying and measuring critical controls.
Checking an entire system of controls is a big job. Reporting on those checks would be an even bigger job and not necessarily a welcome thing if your senior management is as busy as mine. The company I work for employs a criticality filter to focus our accountability on those activities that mean the most.
This article is going the explore both why you might want to use criticality and how you might apply it to your long list of controls.
Rest Assured: Safety Assurance for a Good Night's Sleep
This is part 1 in a 3-part series on proactive safety assurance. This article provides a little overview on safety assurance as a process and a potential way to lighten the load to get started.Of the 4 pillars of ICAO's Safety Management System (SMS) framework, I tend to think that Safety Assurance is the biggest lost opportunity. Policy, risk management and training tend to get done in same manner but a truly proactive assurance program is, in my experience, often overlooked. And that is a shame, because I see the assurance part as the difference between doing safety and managing safety. But the challenge is where to draw the line in terms of detail and reporting. This series looks at how to tackle that problem.
Hop On the Airport Risk Review Merry-Go-Round
You might think you’re all done. You’re now sitting back with your treatments mapped out, all of which are based on your requirements for each of your risk scores relating to your identified species. But this is probably where the management part of risk management comes to the fore.
Monitoring and review is more than a step. Like consultation, it relates to every step of the way. It pops into and out of every other part of the risk management process and different approaches and techniques are required.
The Matrix of Airport Wildlife Risk Management
By now, you’ve got a list of bird and animal species with appropriate risk scores or categories and a list of requirements for each of these categories and this step can either be a lot of fun or infuriatingly frustrating.
Fun, because it involves solving problems and buying toys, and frustrating, because it there are no easy answers. And I’m sorry to report, that this post is not about silver-bullets. There are none.
Remember that context step earlier? That should have been a hint that this series was not going to provide solutions. Instead, we’ve been discussing the approach you can take to implement your own and have confidence in your decisions. So let’s look at how you will decide what toys to buy, what strategies to implement and what activities to perform.
How to Set the Standards for Airport Wildlife Management Decisions
The last article helped you add some data to your list of bird and animal species. Using a risk model, you will have scores or categories (probably with lots of colour) assigned to each of the species.
Now, we can add some meaning to that list.
Often, a risk assessment ends before we get to this step. I've seen a couple of instances where the results of the analysis are ranked with work beginning at the top and working its way down until the resources run out.
But what if the next species down also requires action? And how can you ever make the argument for more resources if your process only ever considers your existing resources?