Friday, November 15, 2013

QA of SMS Simplified


QA of SMS Simplified

NOTE: This post is from one of our frequent contributors to this blog, "Birdseye59604."

There is no simplified Quality Assurance of a Safety Management System. What is simplified is to select and accept simplified steps by adding multiple designs; or multiple triangles, without attempting to cover it all with one huge boulder.

Planning, organizing, action and control of each step is to simplify the QA of SMS. Without planning, the road leads to nowhere. Without organizing, the pieces don't fit. Without action, nothing is happening. Moreover, without control you don't know if you took the right turn at the fork in the road.


The Certificate is the top triangle of Quality Assurance. Everything else are the triangles of QA.

When applying building steps of triangles, one can visualize the imbalance if adding or removing triangles. Take away or add one, then other triangles are not connected.  

Let's look at an Airport QA of SMS since an airport is where a flight begins and ends. Building the triangles of all activities under the Certificate are QA of Safety Management System; Emergency Planning; Wildlife Planning; and Regulations and Standards. At the end of the day, the Certificate to protect from non-compliance becomes the top triangle.

All aspects of operations include Quality Assurance Test along the way to ensure control of processes. With the inclusion of a QA Test at each level, the Accountable Executive has a degree of confidence that the Enterprise is capable of maintaining compliance to regulatory requirements on an on-going basis.


Quality Assurance is to ensure that defined work gives desired result without an unexpected surprise. Out of 3 – one forgot QA.

Quality Assurance of SMS complex and requires planning, timing and defining of results. However, simplified QA of SMS is defining control steps and placing the triangles.

BirdsEye59604

No comments:

Post a Comment

Supervision Factors

  Supervision Factors By OffRoadPilots W hen identifying contributing factors and root causes, an SMS enterprise considers human factors, su...