A Detailed View of High Reliability Organization Models in the Oil

A Detailed View of High Reliability Organization Models in the Oil Industry
The article under review is called “A Detailed View of High Reliability Organization Models in the Oil Industry”. It is written by Abdulaziz Alothman.
The author of the article mentions about penalties, which must be paid by the British Petroleum. These expenses were related to the accident that was caused by the technical factors (untested barriers). The author of the text offers to use the High Reliability Organizations (HRO) theory.
In the beginning of the text the author of the text considers methodology. There was described a V-systems design process applied. There were identified three major use cases for safety management in the oil and gas industry: safety first priority, activity-based safety cost reduction, and contractor and supply-chain safety management. Next, there was making an Architecture Design. The probabilistic sampling strategy was used for both the interviews and the HRO scale audit.
In the section devoted to the consideration of methodology, the author says that there were used three sampling criteria for the purposive sampling of respondents and interviewees. It is noticed, that they had to be in the upstream sector of the oil and gas industry and working or have worked offshore.
To create two parallel assessment methods there were used Integration, Verification and Validation processes. Then there was presented the model operation/deployment to make diagnosis of the SMS reliability state.
To make the text more illustrative, the author gives some schemes: Figure 1, which is called “Systems Approach showing the model’s V-system design process”, and Figure 2 – “Model development process flowchart”. In the flowchart there is shown a diagram from the start to the end. First of all, it is necessary to provide the HRO literature review, and then identify HRO to be audited, design template analysis, define Representative sample, other different operations, and before to finish, one should use model results to provide diagnosis and recommendations.
The next section of the text is “Quantitative Paradigm – The HRO Scales Audit”. Here, the author of the article begins with the definition: The HRO Scales Audit is a quantitative assessment method following the method presented by Weick and Sutcliffe. He also pays attention that the scales audit has three parts: preliminary assessment, five HRO principles and a summarized assessment. It must be said, that method is directed at organizational behavior, but not at individual one. Describing each part, the author of the article says, that the preliminary assessment starts with the “Mindful infrastructure” scale, where each question is equally rated. To sum up, Abdulaziz Alothman writes, that “Mindful infrastructure” scale is supposed to be careful, because deals with high risk business. The “Vulnerability to mindfulness” scale learns in the process of a lesson. As for the “Requirement for mindfulness” – they don’t use human-system interfaces. It must be added, that “Vulnerability to mindfulness” is used in negative tone.
In the section, devoted to the Template Analysis of the quantitative paradigm the author says that the template analysis is the most suitable method. There are reviewed such methods as the grounded theory, content analysis, template analysis, Interpretative Phenomenological analysis (IPA), and framework analysis. Abdulaziz Alothman says that the template analysis is preferable for flexible research. Nigel King’s Template Analysis is best suited for applied research, related to the real-life experiences and feedback.
Then the author discusses the advantages of the template analysis. He thinks that it takes a short time to be completed. It also allows the flexibility to incorporate fresh, more topical issues and new themes. Template analysis is also suited for analysing HRO systems. Fin the end of the section it is emphasized that to develop working models, it is very useful to first develop a mind-map of the themes, and define the nested relationships shown by the cross-category links;
The next section of the text is called “HRO Characteristics and Descriptions”. The model design should be used with the High Reliability Organization body.
There were spent about 30 years of organizational reliability research, and a list of the desirable HRO behaviors and cultures was compiled, with the description of each behavior shown in Table 2.
The Table 2 represents HRO characteristics and their description. For example, definition – describes the challenging environment HROs operate in Unexpected events are managed very frequently. Sudden unexpected Changes – Unexpected events often happen so fast, they leave little or no time for immediate human intervention. And there are other definitions and descriptions.
Also, there is shown a Table 1: the author considers Audit, Scales and Question there. For example, Mindful Infrastructure has 9 scores, 0.33 Rating and Question + ve.
In conclusion the author of the article says that accidents and serious issues could be disastrous to any business in the oil and gas industry. he pays attention of the reader that the modern safety management models are directed at human and operational factors of accident causation.
It should be noticed that this study has explained a model that assesses the third factor of accident causation. The proposed model was run on the HRO, a High Reliability Organization with consistent, excellent safety performance records. For the analysis there were taken the regions with huge portfolios of the HRO’s offshore projects. The model applied two analytical paradigms: the HRO scales audit and the template analysis. The most important feature of this model is that it shows the strengths and the improvement opportunities in the safety management system of the HRO. So, it can be said that the analysis is very useful.
It is planned to use cyber security on safety management system into the model in the next researches.