What's Bothering Me? STD's and ISO 31000
I recently attended a conference and had the pleasure in speaking to a Lady from the meteorological office about their warnings and impact matrix. What she talked about intrigued me, as she started to describe yellow, amber and red warnings along with likelyhood and impacts which are described in ISO 31000. If you want to have a look at impacts for different weather types yourself then [click here]. It started me thinking about risk in our world of projects and how we might start to forecast?Severe Technical Disruption or STD. (You really should clean your act up if you thought different.)
The Impacts (in weather they are for example rain, snow, wind) can be arranged around Political, Economic, Social, Technical, Legal and Environment (PESTLE) assessments.
When it comes to likelihood (the probability of occurrence) we are often stuck with vague comments about once a week, year or “not known in this industry”. This type of calibration relies on the span of knowledge of the individual or team performing the assessment which as we know can be a wee bit misleading!
My method of assessing likelihood is the resilience of technical controls, that is if you have controls in place the likelihood of a STD occurring are slight because errors are corrected and corrective actions are implemented. To forecast an STD you only then need to look at the business and technical controls and make an assessment of how well they are used by the project team. These technical controls are defined in the Project Execution Plan and include for example Risk, Quality, MoC, Cost and of course method statements.
My challenge,
Do you accept having an STD
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Or
Are you using appropriate controls!
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1 年Thanks Suzan. We deal with STD in a sense and use technology and data to mitigate this risk. If anyone would be interested in having a conversation on how we achieve this mitigation happy to connect and share
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1 年If you have problems with Sever Technical Disruption Jamie Burns might be just the person to speak to?
Principal Consultant - Process Safety at PDQ Scotland Ltd
2 年Mike, that's a very useful contribution. I follow posts in the Disaster Recovery group. Most concern current disasters, i.e. it is reactive. I have been concerned about the lack of interest in the 'big one'. No it's not asteroid impact but it also comes from space - a 'Carrington' event, a geomagnetic storm. It would dwarf the impact of Covid, earthquakes, Ukraine, etc and has an estimated frequency of around 80 years. No internet, mobiles, GPS, water supply, electrical power, disruption of food supplies for weeks if not longer. A less intense storm knocked out power to 6 million people in Quebec in 1989 and it almost happened again in 2012. The Earth got out of the way just in time. Getting back to STD, we are not prepared for something of this magnitude because it transcends the ability of individual governments. UKGov knows about it but the plans are not resilient, amounting to having a few spare transformers with emergency services relying on comms with non-functioning mobile phones ! There's also the psychology to consider. As we don't have the the global organising capability to mitigate the consequences, let's put it in the 'too difficult' drawer and manage the ones we currently have.