Risk Management Generated Problems

Risk Management is a must for the Maritime Industry, as it always was before. There are too many factors influencing the processes: people, complex machinery and electronics, forces of the Nature and forces of God.
The question arises that Risk Management as a formal procedure becomes too formal and too stiff for some everyday activities in order to suit the ever declining quality of judgement and ever increasing demand for loss prevention. Here under formalisation meant the process of providing a documented proof of the Risk Assessment actually carried out. Sometimes it is a stupid over-burden, often because of the latter suffers either the quality or feasibility of the Risk Assessment itself.

In order to demonstrate how the malignant bureaucracy chafes the process, let us examine an execution string connecting the two points:

Fig.1. A sample work task process

Further analysis allows to put a Risk Management point somewhere on this string. For the sake of our purposes we are not going to detail out any other points or to delve into the philosophy of iteration and continuation. Therefore the process have the following looks:

Fig.2. Next level of the process detail

Conscious or sub-conscious Risk Management is present all the time at everyday operations. We consider Fig.2. illustrates a process with a “normal” everyday risk management.

Our interest in the topic indicates that quality of the “normal” everyday risk management is not satisfactory and there is need for improvement. One of the goals we set to achieve is to make the risk assessment a standard documented procedure, i.e. to make risk assessment explicitly conscious. Practically it is done when the procedures have been incorporated into a Safety Management System. Real life shows that our process from Fig.2 because of the new properly documented “quality” Risk Management procedure now looks like in Fig.3:

Fig.3. Work task process with Quality Risk Assessment

Increase in circle area means increased effort to done, other words the increased workload for a particular person (let us call this person – Onboard Risk Manager [ORM]). Same time, ORM has all the same skills and all the same available resources despite the increased work. So it results in just ORM's spending more man-hours. On the other hand we achieve better process control, better safety, and better quality (?).
Question: Is there any problem in this?

Yes, there is. Workload on modern seamen have finally come under the scrutiny of the fatigue studies. Either appointed for a particular task or defined on a permanent basis, ORM is a person entitled to appropriate level of decision-making, often an officer highly exposed to fatigue events. His working (non-emergency) timeframe have maximum permissible man-hours. Though permissible is less than possible, due to the fact that today seafarer’s working day is completely saturated with tasks, we encounter such a situation when limit of number of tasks not has been only reached, but is consciously overstepped. Effective prioritization helps, but through leaving the other equally important tasks to wait for the opportunity.

In order to be able to cope with the increased man-hours quality Risk Assessment needs dedicating more men or hours.  The other way lies in enhancing the procedure.
Even being over-optimistic we cannot expect more men onboard. We could hope for more hours though, but these can be provided only basis re-prioritization. The most plausible solution seems to me the enhanced technique of the Risk Management itself:

1. Preparing the Risk Management Templates for standard onboard practices.
2. Developing better automation and document management procedures to replace the implemented.
3. Upgrading risk assessment skills of all the ORM personnel with custom-tailored training programmes (until now there are only the Risk Management Awareness programmes).
4. Providing access for seamen to a searchable Knowledge Base, which gives comprehensive reference to how-to’s and do-not’s of the onboard operations  (these elements are still not present to the desirable level of usefulness).

Conclusions. 
While we definitely need improving the Risk Management effectiveness, we have to realize that it leads to a problem of extra workload for the ship’s staff. There are few remedies to counteract: by allowing more time for proper risk assessment and/or by enhancing the Risk Management procedures.

A.O. Chepok

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.