Risk management professional

Realistically, it has to be concluded that the term ALARP really does not provide much help to risk management professionals and facility managers in defining what levels of risk are acceptable. It may be for this reason that the U.K. HSE chose in the year 2006 to minimize its emphasis to do with ALARP requirements from the Safety Case Regime for offshore facilities. Other major companies have also elected to move away from ALARP toward a continuous risk reduction model (Broadribb, 2008). 

A successful risk management professional needs to have personal attributes that match his or her technical knowledge and skills. Some of these attributes are discussed below. Of course, no single person can possess all of them, but the list does provide an oudine as to goals to aim for. 

Most risk management professionals have a technical education—often in engineering or environmental science. Such an education provides the necessary skills to handle the technical and quantitative aspects of the work, particularly with regard to the analysis or risk, fires and explosions, and gas dispersion. 

The risk management professional should have a thorough understanding of the many technical topics that the discipline covers. Obviously, no one person can be an expert in all of the technical areas that make us risk analysis, but he or she should possess enough knowledge of them in order to develop the correct parameters for risk analyses and to understand the findings and reports that the experts provide. 

The risk management professional should know about incidents and events (both good and bad) that have occurred in other companies and locations. He or she can use these events to understand and identify patterns in current operations. 

So it is for the risk management professional he or she should possess an immense knowledge of incidents that have occurred and what lessons can be drawn from them. An overview of some major incidents in the process industries is provided in Chapter 1. 

It is critical that the resume be accurate and verifiable, especially with regard to statements, such as the possession of advanced degrees, or major work experience. Accuracy of the resume is particularly important when the risk management professional is involved in htigation. He or she must expect to have his qualifications challenged because, if the resume can be discredited, then the expert s statements can be discredited also. 

An expert s resume is greatly enhanced if he or she has published professional papers, articles, and books. Books, in particular, can make a very strong impact— the risk management professional can say 1 wrote the book on that. Here it is ... 

Some risk management professionals have multiple resumes, with each version emphasizing particular qualities. For example, one version may stress say design experience, whereas another may place a greater emphasis on field operational work. 

Risk management professionals report to managers or clients. Therefore, they must know how to communicate information, findings, and insights quickly and effectively. This is generally done in one of three ways ... 

A risk management professional is most likely to be involved in one of the following three types of... 

Major incidents usually require that an unusual, even bizarre, set of events take place because most of the predictable accident scenarios have already been considered, and corrective action taken. Given, therefore, that most incidents are complex and even strange, one of the most important roles of a risk management professional is to explain to the court just what happened in terms and language that they can understand. 

Scope The following are best practice guidelines related to motor carrier log auditing procedures as recommended by industry-leading motor carriers, national and state motor carrier associations, and risk management professionals. 

At the top of this workflow, Observations start with encouraging early reporting of near misses, but should evolve to include regular observations from everyone. More people observing gives safety and risk management professionals real-time information to Analyze and Prioritize for improvement opportunities. 

Risk-management professionals are in demand in virtually every industry. As more industries realize the importance of effective risk management, the demand for experts in this field can only continue to grow. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are currently about 500,000 risk managers in the United States and that this number will increase by 13 percent, or 64,000, before 2016. 

Anecdotally, many risk management professionals believe that process safety performance has improved over the last 20 years. However, the trends shown in Figure 1.7 would seem to belie this belief. 

One of the investigation committees was chaired by James Baker. The report that his committee published is generally referred to as The Baker Report (Baker, 2007). Although most risk management professionals understood the distinction between process and occupational or personal safety, The Baker Report was influential in making that distinction clear, as can be seen from the following quotation. 

Nonprescriptive management programs have to be performance based because the only measure of success is success. Hence the only true measure of success of the program is not to have incidents. But from a theoretical point of view, such a goal is impossible to achieve. No matter how well-run a facility may be, accidents will occur risk can never be zero. For this reason some risk management professionals chose not to use the term compliance on the grounds that true compliance can never be reahzed. Because risk can never be zero, there are always ways of improving safety and operability. 

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