Posted By CFT
Robert

I would like to know what industry you are preparing the QA's for, personally I do see a need to encompass this form of RA in the way in which you suggest for industries such as off-shore, nuclear, railways etc, in the main I seldom find them suitable unless carried out with HAZOP studies and other contributory tools to assess the overall risk matrix .

It may be that the way you are undertaking these assessments is actually right for your industry, and maybe not, if you give an indication into what it is you are assessing the risk of, it will be easier to quantify an answer (really, no pun intended there at all!)

CFT

Posted By Linda Westrupp
This has become common practice in order to prioritise action plans, but if you look at the current HSE advice and their example risk assessment they do not use numerical values. I think it does depend on your industry and what you are trying to achieve. After all, the numbers assigned are still, to a large degree, subjective.
I think if you are going to argue your case you need to be clear about what you are using the numerical values for - prioritisation or because you are used to that system.
Linda

Posted By steve e ashton
The tools used to undertake and / or report risk assessments should always be selected to be appropriate and suitable for the purposes for which they are prepared.

If you are trying to justify employing 200 men inspecting track switches across the Railway infrastructure, I would venture to suggest that you need a fairly robust, quantified assessment of risk to justify the expenditure.

If you are trying to decide whether to buy another couple of extinguishers to install in the local haberdashery - then a simple sentence "it will make a lot of difference a to a medium risk".. may suffice.

And all shades in between. In practice, I have often found that engineers, scientists and accountants are happiest if you can present them with a RA system that contains numbers - that is what they are used to using, and they feel they understand the concepts (even though most cannot distinguish between objective numbers and subjective numbers).

Social workers, lawyers, teachers, sewage treatment operatives, and many others, seem to prefer a RA system that uses common words they can understand and relate to..

There is no single 'right or wrong' answer' - it depends. When discussing this with your gaffer, try to find out what the RA process is for, and who will be using it / using the outputs from it. Try to understand why you and he have differing views on what is needed. If you can understand the basis of the disagreement, you will be much closer to reaching a shared confidence in the system ultimately chosen / implemented.

If you think the system is to justify expenditure, and he thinks the system is to win hearts and minds - then you need to bring this misunderstanding out into the open and find some common ground about the fundamentals before you move on to discuss the nitty gritty details of exactly what system you should use.

Hope this helps clarify things for you.. Sorry its a bit of a ramble

Steve

Posted By Ian Waldram
I suggest that Robert didn't actually mean 'quantified', but was referring to a traditional matrix-type assessment, but with numbers in the matrix.

I agree with those above who suggest that trying to assess the risk "without controls", then identify the controls and reassess to identify the risk "with controls" is too complex an approach for most cases. One of the reasons is that some controls will almost certainly be in place before you start, so no one in the assessment team has any feel for what the situation might be like with absolutely no controls at all.

So I tend to agree with Robert's boss - he's making it too complex. But of course, the process IS meant to identify whether any other controls could reasonably be applied, and judging whether they are indeed reasonable should include an assessment of how much they will further reduce the risk. So Robert is also right to expect some kind of 'before assessment' and 'after assessment' comparison of risks.

Posted By Robert S Woods
Crim,

Sorry for if I apper to be a bit thick but when you say a single risk assessment, I take it you mean for a task with the individual hazards analysed. Not one risk assessment for an undertaking, i.e. a single risk assessment that covers the whole of a companies activities.

In my humble opinion the document I have been asked to use is a management system audit, combined with a hazard spotting checklist.

The risk assessment would be carried out by me with the assisstance of the company MD or their representative.

The actual tasks I claim to be assessing may not have been carried out whilst I was there. I may not have seen the piece of equipment that is to be used, but because I've been told that all machinery has appropriate guarding and that all operators of machines have been trained would mean all machinery based tasks have been assessed.

Hope that made sense.

Posted By Robert S Woods
Pete post the link.

Posted By Chris Jerman
The obvious problem with assessing pre and post controls is in deciding what you mean by no controls. Take welding for example. Does no control mean a baby? or does it mean a competent welder, but no screens? For general, obvious task driven assessments there is little real benefit to assessing twice. And it is simply more work. For me recording the significant findings is about saying how well or badly we do a task in reality and not how it might be if we did nothing.
I used to do both until I realised that it was more effort trying to decide which controls to omit than include.

Posted By Crim
Robert,

The way I see risk assessments is to look at an individual work station and its interface with the user. If this is required numerous times in a large workplace then so be it. Once all assessments are completed you then prioritise the action issues by looking at the quantified results. The higher the risk rating the sooner the action is required.

When there is a need for an individual assessment because a job has changed in some way, i.e. new equipment, new employee, new task required, then you carry out the individual assessment and carry out any corrective action ASAP.

Not teaching anyone to suck eggs but thought further explanation necessary.

Posted By Andy Petrie
I personally prefer not to do the uncontrolled risks as it can be very confusing.

For example, if assesing the risk of driving would you do the risk without brakes?

If you do it this way then be clear that when you do the uncontrolled risks that you are actually taking into account a number of controls already and it's just the optional/unreliable ones that you are considering.