What are the Principles?

The explosion and fire at the Buncefield oil storage depot in 2005 led to the establishment of a Process Safety Leadership Group (PSLG).  They developed a set of 8 Principles for senior leaders to follow with the goal of reducing the risk of future similar events.

The UK offshore oil and gas industry endorsed a similar agreement and agreed a set of Process Safety Leadership Principles in November 2019.  The signatories to this were the Offshore Energies UK (formerly OGUK), Step Change, IADC and the Competent Authority (HSE).

There are 8 Principles for senior industry figures to follow. This requires putting Process Safety Leadership at the core of a business, engaging with the workforce, senior leadership team involvement and competence in safety management.

These 8 Principles are shown below (source: https://oeuk.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Principles-of-Process-Safety-Leadership-OGUK.pdf).

The 8 Principles can be neatly captured in four key themes;

• Leadership
• Engagement
• Performance Management
• Shared Learning

To set a foundation for discussing this topic, there are two initial questions to reflect on;

What is Process Safety?

What is Process Safety Leadership?

When we start a discussion with these questions, we see how diverse individual and team perceptions can be in this critical topic.

What should I be doing about the Principles?

We have learned painful lessons from major accident events in the past, including Flixborough, Bhopal, Seveso, Piper Alpha, Deepwater Horizon, Texas City and Buncefield.

These tragic events consistently show that failures in leadership lie at the heart of the underlying management system failures.

The 8 Principles provide a foundation for industry leaders to drive continuous improvement.

At the OGUK HSE conference in 2021, the HSE placed a spotlight on these Principles.  The clear expectation from the HSE was that all operators should assess themselves against the 8 Principles and implement an improvement plan.

Moreover, the HSE announced their intention to include inspection of Process Safety Leadership as part of their regular inspections of offshore operators. This would include wide ranging engagement with senior leaders and the workforce.

Where can I get help with my Principles of Process Safety Leadership Assessment and Improvement plan?

The team at Scapa Energy has a wealth of experience in process safety as former regulatory inspectors, as leaders in operating companies, and as subject matter experts.  We have developed an effective and versatile approach to assessing your organization’s alignment with the process safety leadership principles.

The first phase of the assessment involves one-to-one engagement with individual senior leaders to establish both their knowledge and understanding of process safety and the actions and behaviours they take to support process safety in your organization.

The second phase involves engagement sessions with the workforce to gain their perspective and provide 360-degree feedback to leadership on process safety leadership effectiveness.

The findings from the assessment not only map directly to the Principles but can also be mapped to your organisation’s existing Process Safety Framework.

The assessment identifies clear opportunities for improvement that can be incorporated into your Process Safety improvement plans and programmes.

This post was written by Bryan Cousland, Principal Consultant, Scapa Energy.

Featured image courtesy Gexcon (www.gexcon.com)

Learning and Feedback

You will be familiar with many organisational learning and improvement models, such as Plan-Do-Check-Act and the related ISO Management Frameworks.

In theory, these models all have their merit.

What do your own experiences tell you? Are you confident that your organisation learns from events, incidents, audit, assurance?

From our experiences we see the most significant challenge and opportunity is effectively connecting all the elements to close the loop.

The feedback loops essential for connecting the various parts of the organisational system often get stuck. Senge’s ‘The Fifth Discipline’ provides great insight to the importance of effective feedback and reflecting on actual performance.

Scapa Energy Assessment Model

At Scapa Energy, we use a practical framework to assess and help improve overall performance of Operators to manage Major Accident and High Hazard Hazard risk;

It starts with effective leadership. Setting expectations and setting a healthy context for teams to operate is essential.

Managing high hazardous operations requires aware, competent and experienced teams. A strong management framework and clear procedures that are followed in practice must be in place.

We need to contain hazardous fluids through effective hardware, maintenance and integrity management controls.

This all must be done with effective co-ordination, planning and communication.

Audit and assurance must be effective, incident investigation must assess systemic issues.

And finally, closing the loop requires tangible action with leadership commitment.

If these interconnected elements are in place and working effectively, there is a powerful reinforcing feedback loop.

Conversely, if any one of these elements or their connections are not working performance will be affected. This could be for example;

• Ineffective learning from audits and incidents. This could be influenced by audit or investigation effectiveness, or by inadequate communication of learning, and ineffective management of actions.
• Actions that are not clear, or not part of an overall improvement strategy
• Not checking in at the right times to ensure improvement actions are making the right impact

Using the Model in our Practice

The Scapa model has proved effective for a range of activities, for example;

• Assessing overall Operator capability to meet regulatory requirements, including ‘Regulation 5’ Audits
• Independent audit and assurance activities of Operational Risk Management Controls, Integrity Management or Competence Management
• Assessing the effectiveness of Performance Management
• Independent investigations, or peer review of operator investigations
• Developing operator and duty holder strategic improvement plans
• Leadership coaching in an MAH context

It is our aim to create valuable insight that creates purposeful action using these approaches. In turn, these actions improve performance and reduce the risk of unplanned events.

The UK Regulator understand the importance of effective monitor, audit and review. They have recently published Inspection Guidance (available from https://www.hse.gov.uk/offshore/ed-audit-monitoring-review.pdf). Expect the HSE to include this topic in upcoming inspection activity.

OGUK have also published industry guidance to help operators get organised for effective internal assurance (https://oguk.org.uk/product/assurance-toolkit/). This provides a flexible toolkit to help operators design and implement internal assurance activities.

If you are interested in discussing how Scapa Energy can support you to manage risk and improve performance, just drop a note to any of the team.

You may also be interested in reading our recent post on our Remote Working Engagement Model (https://www.scapaenergy.uk/remote-resilience/).

Featured image: ‘Ascending and Descending’, M.C. Escher, 1960

Groundhog Day?

Well, it’s more or less a year since we all had to make major adjustments to our daily lives. Little did any of us believe we would still be working with our lives significantly restricted by the continued fight against Covid-19.

All this is a minor inconvenience when we think of the millions of people who have been infected, severely ill, or sadly passed because of this modern disaster.

In the context of our daily work, everyone I know has embraced these circumstances with humility, professionalism, and of course a little light-heartedness to keep us smiling. We are all now pretty much expert on Teams and the more adventurous among us have built a nice collection of background themes, including borrowing sets from Star Wars…

Source: Star Wars Backgrounds

Thankfully the industry’s control rooms are not quite like this. Thinking of the dedicated site-based teams and those supporting them, they have shown great resilience to maintain safe operations whilst minimising Covid-19 risks and delivering on business results. This has indeed been an arduous and unrelenting challenge.

Innovation by Necessity

We are also not in a Groundhog Day scenario. Individuals, teams and organisations have innovated and adapted remarkably well.

In my previous post, I talked of two key questions;

• How long will the Covid-19 tail be i.e. how long will the impact on working patterns persist?
• What structural changes will be introduced, or remain in place, for the foreseeable future?

I think the first question is answered. This will be a very long tail.

On the second question, I can only talk directly to Scapa Energy experiences. We quickly adapted our way of working, which has also created positive outcomes in surprising ways.

Before Covid, our business activities were driven by face-to-face engagement – at site locations, at our client’s offices, and in our own offices. When this came to a juddering halt, we very quickly developed and implemented a remote assurance process.

This remote approach required us to;

• Be more stringent with planning and co-ordination with our clients
• Prepare more rigorous Terms of Reference and pre-engagement question sets
• Request the client to complete these question sets before engagement discussions
• Embrace remote working technology
• Apply Systems Thinking from a remote perspective

Scapa Energy Remote Engagement Process©

This provided structure to work remotely. We recognise this wasn’t a substitute for ‘boots on the ground’. But after successful delivery of this approach for close to a year, we have found;

• Clients are better prepared by reviewing and responding to the question sets
• Client engagements are more focussed  during the engagement and there are less distractions
• More focussed analysis of information and documents through pre-read and screen-share
• More thorough data analysis with provision of remote access to software applications
• Using remote communications is not a barrier to active engagement
• Our principles of partnering with clients to reduce risk and improve performance continue to be met

Collectively, these benefits bring an overall value-add that we had not anticipated.

Delivery

We have seen these benefits in the range of remote independent assurance services we provide, for example;

• Safety Case Regulation 5 Audits
• Offshore focussed Control of Work Audits
• Maintenance Effectiveness Review
• Process Integrity Audits
• Technical Professional Competence Assessments (West Africa)
• Independent Incident Investigation

These services also provide a key option to meet regulator and industry expectations, reinforced with the recently published OGUK Assurance Toolkit (https://oilandgasuk.co.uk/product/assurance-guidelines/).

Scapa Energy are grateful for the ongoing support from our existing and new clients to enable the delivery of these range of remote services. This has not been possible without the resilience and professionalism of the Scapa Energy team.

We have already committed to maintaining a mixed blend of delivery, getting the best of both worlds as we move into a state of new normal.

Featured image: ‘Bright Side’, courtesy Michael Luinig (leunig.com.au)