Responsibility and ownership

These moves are welcome because they help to ascribe ownership and responsibility, and give a chance for more equal representation from commercial, academic and regulatory sources. 

Blendon, Robert J., John T. Young, and David Hemenway. The American Public and the Gun Control Debate. JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 275, June 12, 1996, pp. 1719ff. Breaks down public opinion in a detailed analysis of attitudes toward guns, nature of gun ownership, and responses to a variety of specific proposals. Although some of the data is becoming stale, the approach and organization are instructive. 

Clear points of P L accountability are established, thus promoting personal ownership and responsibility for results along a clearly defined range of products - a prerequisite for a no excuses policy (with reference to implications for the design of site services, the reader is referred to Chapter 20). 

Ownership and responsibility for the accuracy of the data is a real issue with an enterprise wide system, and departments are no longer in direct control of data uniquely used for their own purposes. The responsibility for the specification and authorization of changes must be clearly defined. 

Although it could be suggested that positioning safety as a separate entity is a simple rhetorical manifestation of reference to an abstract concept, reflective of safety management systems, it is equally suggestible that it is prec/se/y the associations with ownership and responsibility that are important here, and have actually helped develop our shared understandings. In constructing safety in this way, it is set apart from any personal responsibility, ownership or action and ultimately becomes either its own, or more likely within the context, someone else s responsibility. 

However, engagement and enforcement are not mutually exclusive and, when unpacked, it can be suggested that through these two different voices of safety, different realities are developed and again incoherence and inconsistency of safety can be found sometimes rules are made to be broken, punishment is a necessary evil, whilst engagement can prove problematic in its impact, raising far more complex issues of the ownership and responsibility for safety on sites. 

If we sit back and just think about how complicated safety is -how it is different for different people, how it shifts and changes in its relationships with work, whether it is embedded with in practice or left to stand alone, or even pushed off to one side with all the other non-productive aspects of construction management, whether it has a fixed state or is far more intangible and shifting with time and space, whether it is linked more closely to management and control, engagement and enforcement, ownership and responsibility - we can start to get a better idea of how complicated its management should perhaps be. 

Duijm et al. (2008) reviewed the present status of industrial HSE management in European Union member states. It was stated that there should be an investigation to determine how to most effectively manage HSE in the case of shared ownership and responsibility. Prime examples of this are in the form of industrial parks, leasing and outsourcing. HSEQ AP is a method that observes this feature and is one example of how to manage H, S, E and Q effectively. 

There are three basic issues in lead pipe rehabilitation (i) lead pipe lateral rehabilitation on the public portion of the water supply system that runs from the water main to the water meter or stop-cock (curb-stop) (ii) lead pipes on the private portion of the water supply line from the meter or stop-cock to the house and (iii) lead pipe-work within the house. Whilst the only 100% control method will be the removal or all lead pipes, there are substantially less expensive alternatives available consisting of chemical treatment and internal cathodic protection. Total lead pipe removal also has the problem of split ownership and responsibility, disturbance, and destruction of land-scaping (external) and decoration (internal). 

Transference is the second category. Seek to shift the consequence of a risk to a third party. While this shifts at least some of the ownership and responsibility for the risk s management, it does not eliminate it. An example is to subcontract the geotechnical work. 

Maintenance of the process is underpinned by housekeeping and cleanliness. This starts with designing processes and facilities to create order. There is a place for ever5hhing, and everything has its place. Orderliness depends on a thinking workforce that has accepted ownership and responsibility for organising the work place. Attention to detail in terms of respect for human issues is an essential part of JIT philosophy (Harrison and Storey, 2000). 

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