Taking Action on Risk | Blog Risk Management in a Web 2.0 World

When Action Tracking Just Ain’t Enough

When organizations undertake activities such as risk assessments, operational reviews, corrective actions, audits, plant shutdowns, factory acceptance tests, design changes, technical queries, critical operating procedures the result is always a set of important actions that have to be tracked properly. The process of addressing these type of actions varies dramatically between organizations. One thing is common though. They all are a pain to manage and close if you want to do it properly. Due to this common issue, human nature has an effect on the outcome. The level of diligence and effort by individuals at addressing critical actions varies and this can be for a variety of reasons. People may not have enough time to focus on the management of these actions or they may not have the necessary level of experience. They may also have problems with the tools they have at their disposal to help manage actions or they may have a poor management culture within their organization, that does not understand the pitfalls associated with poor action tracking. So what are the consequences of poor action tracking? It depends on the type of action and it's associated risk. Good organizations rank their actions by risk level to allow visibility of higher consequence and/or higher frequency events. Higher risk actions are obviously going to result in worse events. Lets just consider one example from the numerous types of activities listed above. Say a design change notice resulted in a requirement for a lower temperature metal at a flange face on a pressure vessel. The action was not addressed when it should have been and the project moved on, and in an effort to close out the action to meet schedule, the change notice was not properly addressed and the lower temperature flange was never installed...and now the facility is built and operating. One cold day during a process upset condition that creates a lower operating temperature, when the flanges cold temperature properties are called into service, there is a major release of chemical from the flange, destroying the plant and killing numerous people. One root cause at the inquiry was poor metallurgy at low ambient and operating temperatures. But years have gone by since the plant was built. No records of the original design can be found. The design change is long gone. No traceability or ability to audit the design to this level is possible. The mistake is not clearly understood as there is not enough in the records to help determine the root cause of the faulty metal. Even if the data is there to find and the lack of effective action tracking has been noted its too late as the event has already happened.

So how do we eliminate these types of latent risks and the many other design and operation risks that lead to incidents? Well, a good place to start is with the actions themselves. In today's world, incorrect closeout of actions due to poor tracking can be helped by using the cloud based technology, allowing everyone to work off the same list. But what really has to happen is people need to change the way they think about actions. Rather than call the process action tracking, why not give it the respect it deserves and call it action management? When you manage something you must demonstrate full understanding of the status and be able to report intelligently from start to finish. If you think of how you should manage your important project actions in this way, perhaps you and your team will find way to make sure the numerous actions and their ongoing status remains within easy reach of the key decision makers on you team. By providing full visibility and using a tool that understands the difference between action tracking and action management, you should be able to provide the visibility, accountability and audibility needed to satisfy yourself, your team, insurers, regulators and shareholders.