2009 Q5 SAFETY ASSURANCE THROUGH LIFE CYCLE PHASES

[PJW]

Hi Peter,

I have been accepted to sit Mod 1 and 5 this year. Please see attached my attempts at questions 2, 5 and 7 of last year's Mod 1 paper.

Regards

Gethin

Q5
First section- a little bit sketchy for 7 marks I think and perhaps rather more of a "describe" than "explain". A little bit more detail and examples such as showing what you understand by "outline design level" would help. However I think you'd get at least 4/7 for what you've written.

Second section-
This started well enough but didn't live up to its early promise; I don't feel that you really:
a) "described how safety can be assured through EACH of these major stages"
b) "explained qualative/ quantitative risk assessment"
c) "described HOW cost enefit analysis can be used"
However you were "there or thereabouts".
You needed to give a wider range of examples which covered different stages within the lifecycle and also different sorts of risk- system, personnel, to installer, to maintainer, to passengers, to public, to environment.....
You need to illustrate by showing the variety of things that might go into the risk register, the Health & Safety file, the Operations & Maintenance manuals.
In total you had less than half a page and that just isn't going to be sufficient for 12 marks. You also used quite a few abbrieviations without defining / explaining. Definitely along the right lines but more flesh on the bones needed- give some typical examples of how risks are identified and categorise, how the safety benefit of a suggested mitigation is determined, what yardstick is used to determine whther it is "worth it", what makes it esential to adopt despite the cost etc.


Third section.
Again you can't hope to get 6 marks for 6 lines of text. I think you need to give some specific examples of what sort of design documents are reviewed, how a review can give confidence that the remit has been met. Probably need to talk about traceability and the use of tools to help show this.

Scope creep is certainly an issue worth raising, but worth putting in context in that there tend to be a range of stakeholders. A Train Operating Company may just want a longer platform so that they can run a longer train, however standards may require that not just the extension itself but the entire platform to be brought up to current safety standards and then perhaps legislation may also require diability access and that may need lifts to be provided on this platform and at the station entrance and hence costs spiral out of all proportion etc. This may well seem to be scope creep from the TOC's perspective as all they wanted was another 25m length of platform surface, but realistically in the world we live, then it was actually naive not to have realised initially that this would all be part and parcel of imnplementing the project. This should have been identified at the pre-feasibility stage and therefore, if they weren't able to justify the expenditure, then the idea quickly rejected before significant time and effort expended. Hence the project requirements are not just those relating to the business need, but those reflecting the reasonable aspirations of the safety regulator, maintainer etc.

So overall I don't think that this answer is quite up to a Pass but if it had been consistently up to the standard of the best bits then it would have been. You didn't do enough to demonstrate clearly that you had the full understanding that comes with experience. What you wrote was generally fine, but it needed bringing to life and the second (in particular) and third sections related back to the first section. You didn't mention the GRIP stage gates- what they are, the purpose for having them etc and this would have helped.