Aviation Safety Management Systems Business Area Owner Responsibilities considerations by Sofema Aviation Services.
The responsibility of the business area owner is to consider mitigation proposals and take the appropriate actions.
Post Holders (Nominated Persons) have direct responsibility for Quality Control and for their respective business areas. They also have direct responsibility for the success of the SMS within the same business area.
Unfortunately, some business area owners look over their shoulders believing that it is the responsibility of the Safety Manager to deliver an effective SMS – this is manifestly incorrect and it is not at all how it is written in any of the regulatory requirements.
The specific role of the Safety Manager is as a service provider to the business areas, providing a resource which delivers documentation as well as training, together with a risk analysis process which delivers an understanding regarding identified exposures and presents a mitigation proposal.
So to be clear on 2 counts:
a) The mitigation proposal is exactly that – “A Proposal” the business area owner is under no obligation to comply with the mitigation proposal.
b) He is however under a specific obligation to ensure that the exposure is dealt with in an effective way – of course, they may be budgetary considerations so the actual mitigated action may not be the “ideal” as seen by the SMS office.
Moving on from the delivered mitigation – the system reboots and any changes are of course kept under scrutiny – It may be that the mitigation was satisfactory and perceived risk has lowered.
Conversely, the risk may still be too high and it will again find itself being assessed.
This time of course the fact that changes have already been effected sits alongside the steps already taken so there is an increase of pressure (or moral obligation) on the Manager to take a more robust action.
As an aside, that we have gone through this process of change management which has not delivered the degree of success it was expected to deliver means that we are building a business case which can be taken to the accountable manager if additional funding is required.
In any event we have an enhanced degree of visibility which is one of the positives of our Safety Management system in aviation.
Developing a Project Based approach to implementing improvements within an appropriate time-frame.
The advantage of wrapping a project around a desire, wish or obligation to drive an improvement within the business driven from a Safety Management System input is that we have a higher level of accountability.
It is this higher level of accountability which makes the Project based approach worthwhile.
Having identified the need for an improvement we should endeavour to create a “funded” project.
Even in the case of no external funding being required we will still need to provide a human resource in the form of manpower to see the project through to fulfillment.
Key elements which will drive the success of any project include:
a) Accountability (ownership) of the project
b) Commitment and a desire to see fulfillment
c) Appropriate resources both in terms of financial and human capital
d) Agreed timescales in which the project shall be completed (this is an obligation on the part of the project owner and if it is likely that the project will not complete then it shall be fully accounted for to the executive.)
With the above in place the likelihood of success of our project is high – which of course is our goal!
Next Steps
Sofema Aviation Services offers a range of SMS Training courses, both as Open and In Company training. For details of available training courses please see www.sassofia.com or email team@sassofia.com
