(79a) Identifying Key Safety Roles during Organisational Change

As businesses move to lean manufacture to minimised costs this inherently leads to reduced staffing levels. During these organisational changes it is important that safety is not compromised by the removal of key staff. In order to prevent major accident events occurring; a number of layers of controls and defences are put in place to both prevent an event and to mitigate the consequences if an event occurs. There are many competing techniques for assessing the impact of organisational change, each of which has its pro's and cons.

This paper discusses a technique based on the use of the Bow Tie methodology to analyse major accident scenarios for a high hazard site, presenting examples from a real life case study. Controls identified in the analysis then have a responsible person assigned to them and a summary of these roles is used to define the impact of removing a role. Keys roles responsible for safety controls will be maintained and any eliminated roles can have their responsibilities reassigned. After the change final role descriptions will specifically include descriptions of key safety control responsibilities.