Published Articles

Critical Controls: What Keeps You Up at Night?
Safety Dan Parsons Safety Dan Parsons

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.

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Rest Assured: Safety Assurance for a Good Night's Sleep
Safety Dan Parsons Safety Dan Parsons

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.

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