Thursday, March 30, 2017

Accept Reject Criteria

You can NOT Audit, Assess or Inspect on OPINION!

When a company develops it's Policy, Processes and Procedures, they should do so using a team made up of Subject Matter Experts, SMEs, Stake holders and especially those with the "Profound" knowledge. Dr. W. Edwards Deming, "...those who actually do the job have the profound knowledge of the job.." With this in mind, the procedures for these areas must be developed and the subsequent audit checklists are based on this procedural standard. So the auditor must totally depend on the Audit checklist for determining what is right and what is wrong. Accept/Reject criteria must be clear so that is no doubt of the requirement. Once we introduce opinion, we now have NO objectivity and have no idea what is right and wrong only what is considered right in somebody's mind!

https://youtu.be/LLmbqa02CtM


Monday, March 27, 2017

A Qualified Person Runs The SMS


A Qualified Person Runs The SMS

Another great post from CatalinaNJB

When an airport operator or an air operator appoints a qualified person as the Accountable Executive, the options are wide open to appoint anyone in the organization who they see qualified to be responsible for operations or activities authorized under the certificate and to be accountable on behalf of the operator for meeting the requirements of the regulations. The requirement to qualify as the AE is a person who has demonstrated control of the financial and human resources that are necessary for the activities and operations authorized under the certificate. This is a broad description of qualifications, but becomes limited to organizational structure of authority.   

The AE is a psition without performance requirements    
The appointment of an airport AE compared to an air operator AE is slightly different, since an airport certificate is issued to a land-surveyed area, while an air operator certificate is issued to an individual or a corporate body. An AE for an airport is responsible to the land-surveyed area, while the AE for an air operator is responsible to the board of directors. However, as operators both AEs are responsible on behalf of the certificate holder for meeting the requirements of the regulations, which one of them are the Safety Management System regulations. 

An Accountable Executive requirement could also be a matter of identifying a person who leads the necessary cultural change of Just Culture and Quality Assurance Culture and how services are provided with safety assurance to the general public. Without an SMS there is no safety assurance.



 Aviation Safety Management System is the NextGen of aviation safety, where a cultural change is inevitable for an SMS leader to be successful. Culture change does not happen overnight, but over a lengthy period of time. For a Just Culture to develop, each individual in an organization must be acceptable to these changes. The Just Culture and Quality Assurance Cutlers are developed within an organization by personnel consuming data, applied learning to data for processing into information, engage their information in operational processes with an output of knowledge and by assessing this output and comprehend the systems involved in a change of culture. This change is culture is the Return on Investment (ROI).

SMS is a businesslike approach to safety, where ROI is vital to success. When a certificate holder is applying this businesslike approach to safety and appoints a qualified person as the Accountable Executive, the requirement of demonstrating control over human and financial resources is incidental to the ROI. When applying this concept the NextGen of Accountable Executive Leaders in Aviation SMS are born.

CatalinaNJB

Monday, March 13, 2017

AE Demonstrating Control Of Financial And Human Resources

AE Demonstrating Control Of Financial And Human Resources

Another great post from CatalinaNJB

In an SMS world the leader of the SMS program is the Accountable Executive, or the AE, who is playing the role as a sponsor of a specific project. A sponsor is a person who provides funding necessary, or a percentage of a project or activity carried out by someone else. A sponsor does not have direct inputs on the activities in the project, but can affect management decisions by withdrawing the sponsorship or increase their funding of both financial and human resources. Upon the completion of the project there is no impact on the sponsor, other than the reputation of the project, or activity that was sponsored. It works the same way in aviation, being an airline or an airport, as long as the 
Comprehension of the SMS is what defines human and financial resources    
Accountable Executive can document their role as the sponsor of the project by the control of financial and human resources; the only repercussion to the operations is their pride and reputation from devastating audit findings.
It is assumed that the more funding and personnel that is assigned to a project, the more successful and safe the project will be. This wrongful assumption is supported by a requirement that a person, or position, is not designated as the role of the AE unless they have control of the financial and human resources that are necessary for the activities and operations authorized under the aviation certificate. With this requirement, an operator may be hesitant to restrict, or reject funding or personnel to the operations when the safety–card is applied.

There is no enforcement available when the AE restricts, reject or withdraw funding from an SMS program. The regulatory requirements is not directly linked to the funding itself, but to the result, or output of the Safety Management System. If an increase in funding from the sponsor, or AE, of an airline or airport as the only means to safety solutions would reduce the risk level, then it would be redundant, excessive, or even an injustice to the public to operate with a Safety Management System.

Safety and SMS in aviation is not a contrast in colors, but shades of variables    


Under an SMS there is a requirement that the AE has control of financial and human recourses. Unless the operation is a sole proprietor or a corporation with 51% shares, there is no person who singlehandedly has control over these financial and human resources. With a requirement that the AE must demonstrate control of these resources, this demonstration task becomes to demonstrate by the quality of the safety management system itself. If the AE, as the sponsor of the program, is on a path to success or in a downward losing spiral the resources are available tools, but not the strategic solution to safety. The more resources that are inputted on the controls of an airplane in a spiral do not eliminate the spiral, but is assisting the spiral in an increasingly downward trend. For an airplane to exit a spiral it takes leadership, management, system understanding and application of resources to knowledge from data collected. Financial and human resources in aviation safety, or with an SMS, are not the solutions, but variables within the processes which are harnessed by their role within one system, for the total system to produce the desired, or planned, outcome.

An Accountable Executive who is defining the quality of an SMS system by human and financial resources only may not contribute to the safe operations of an airport or aircraft, while an Accountable Executive who is a leader within an SMS system applying strategic safety solutions is on a path of continuous safe operations. 


CatalinaNJB

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