Qantas Group - Critical risk enhancement program

Safety Leadership Charter, Guiding Principle 4: “Create the internal capacity to proactively manage safety and collectively achieve organizational safety goals.

Background

Qantas Group identified an opportunity to bring a renewed focus on managing its most significant safety risks. This would provide ongoing and enhanced management confidence in the effectiveness of its approaches to support safety throughout its airlines.

The Group identified 21 significant risks across all of its operations, focusing on 3 areas: flying, engineering and maintenance, and people safety.

The Qantas Group Critical Risk Enhancement Program is part of this renewed focus.  Led by a dedicated Group Safety Programs team, it aims to enhance how the Group manages its most significant people safety risks. The program is applying “critical risk management methodology”, which is an approach applied in other industries with high risk of fatalities to workers.

The program touches the entire Qantas Group and provides a common approach to support people safety in all parts of the operation.

Brief description of the initiative

The program is focussed on the identification, assessment, and enhancement of critical risk controls. the day-to-day operation, especially when unanticipated factors arise, or work arounds are considered.

The initiative involves key steps:

• Define the risk and existing controls.
• Determine which controls are critical controls. 
• Assess effectiveness of these controls and opportunity for enhancements
• Implement critical control enhancement actions.
• Promote and educate critical controls.
• Monitor control effectiveness.

The program is currently focused on 3 of its critical risk areas:

1. Working at height
2. Traffic management (i.e.: movement of people, equipment, and vehicles airside, in warehouses and engineering hangars) and
3. Psychosocial risk

What positive changes this initiative helped bring?

Qantas Group has endorsed and published “critical controls” for working at height and traffic management. 
Examples of critical controls include:

• Working at Height: equipment is parked safely, stabilised and unintended removal or movement controlled.
• Traffic Management: physical separation of vehicles, plant or equipment and pedestrians or barriers are provided and maintained.

In addition to defining and documenting critical controls, tools have been developed to support business areas to enhance the critical controls in process, equipment, education and work design. 
Examples of other observable positive changes are:

• Increased focus and understanding, at all levels of the organisation, of the importance of managing critical risks.
• Increasing alignment and consistency in the application of Group and local improvement initiatives to focus on critical risk and implement controls to avoid ‘bad outcomes.

Critical control enhancement is an ongoing journey, and the organisation is continuing to focus on critical risk management, with focus on the other critical risk areas and future changes to equipment and work design. 

Main challenges and lessons-learned

Implementing critical risk management end-to-end for large, matrix organisations require significant leadership commitment, investment of appropriate technical and program management resources, and a preparedness to commit for the “long haul”, potentially over several years, unless an “agile” implementation approach is feasible.

Positive outcomes may take time to be embedded and observed, so patience, managing expectations and ongoing monitoring of change is required.