Management systems personnel issues

Documentation must be seen as a management and personnel issue of the highest order. Any lapse in the documentation updating process can result in disaster. Procrastination and the resulting lack of follow through will destroy any documentation system and ultimately result in plant failures, extend down-time, and premature rebuilding of the facility. 

All documents Issued to personnel In the laboratory as part of the management system shall be reviewed and approved for use by authorized personnel prior to Issue. 

Lack of training. Projects, being discontinuous phenomena, are naturally associated with discontinuous employment and the use of new staff. Training needs and the associated time-lags easily lead to the use of relatively untrained staff over peak periods. All project personnel are involved, not just data input clerks. For instance, a site storeman who understands neither the need for meticulous input nor the consequences of error - but does understand the need to issue materials promptly under pressure - can and will reduce a computerized materials management system to irreversible chaos. Unreliable software support staff Software developers may understand that they are well-positioned to make themselves... 

To simplify the issue and demonstrate our approach in a clear and easy way, we use a small use case from the personnel management domain. The scenario is as follows there are two companies, company X and company Y. They bought the same personnel management system from a software supplier. Then they find they need to improve that system in order to make it fit to their situations. For company X, they would like to use the concept employee instead of person, and... 

The integrated issues management system shall have a mechanism similar to that required in the commercial nuclear industry under Title 10 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Part 50.59 to define the significance of an issue or condition to personnel/reactor safety. The system shall also provide a mechanism to determine the root cause of the condition, the remedial corrective action(s) or compensatory measure(s) to be taken, and action(s) to prevent recurrence. The results of such evaluations shall be provided to senior contractor management for review and transmission to the DOE. 

EPRI NP-5664 is a study based on interviews of personnel at 10 utilities and 15 NRC personnel regarding the usefulness of PSA (they use the term PRA - probabilistic risk assessment). The general utility motivation for using PSA is to demonstrate an acceptably low level of risk to the NRC. Some utilities applied PSA to individual systems, functions, or issues. These smaller [ir(>grams served to train a PSA cadre and introduce PSA to other utility personnel and management. 

Customer" Expectations. Keep in mind that the output of your PSM systems design must address the needs of a range of "customers," including senior management, facility and other operating personnel, and the PSM team itself. As you approach designing the PSM system, you may want to revisit their expectations. Systems will also have to reflect issues such as plant size, location, type of operation, and types and quantities of materials used. 

Control systems will play a key role in future distributed plants ]139,145]. As a rule of thumb, plants will be smaller and simpler, but the control systems will be much more advanced, of a standard not known today. Plant personnel for operation and managing will ultimately no longer be required, except for start-up, shutdown, and services. This is a shift from a regulatory to a servo role, supported by a sophisticated sequence control. Control is needed for safety issues, operability, and product quality control. Sensors have a central role to provide the information needed for control and modeling and simulation is needed for process models. 

Third, as the anthrax vaccine experience reveals, both DoD acquisition personnel and the contractors hired by DoD have not always possessed the technical and managerial expertise for working with FDA. Interactions with FDA, especially in licensing-related efforts, involve a complicated three-way relationship among DoD, the private contractor, and FDA. This relationship is quite unlike either the two-way relationship between DoD and defense contractors involved in the procurement of weapon systems or the two-way interaction between FDA and a private drug firm. The policy and operational issues about how to manage these three-way relationships have yet to be worked out. 

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