System safety products

Most of the system safety effort involves providing a service. That service is to identify, analyze, and control hazards as early in the hfe cycle as possible in order to produce cost-effectively a safer end product. Several products are produced as part of the system safety effort. These products (all documents) communicate and document risk information to management and provide a means of monitoring and auditing the effort. 

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List and define six typical system safety products or documents that a contractor may be required to prepare. 

An important part of the government system safety effort is to assure that system safety requirements are specified clearly and correctly in contract documents. The formats for system safety products or deliverables are generally prescribed by data item descriptions (DIDs). Other specific requirements concerning the exact documents to be produced and delivered are specified in the contractor requirements data list (CRDL). 

The MORT tools and techniques can be helpful in preparing a safety analysis report (SAR), the upstream safety product most frequently required for new DOE programs, but the more common system safety products (system safety program plan, preliminary hazard analysis, system/subsystem hazard analysis, operating hazard analysis) are not a dominant part of the MORT program and are seldom even referenced in System Safety Development Center (SSDC) documents. 

The purpose of the system safety program plan (SSPP) is to identify the specific system safety requirements for a given project, to include specified system safety tasks, risk assessment methodology and risk acceptance criteria, system safety products and milestones, and system safety organization. 

System Safety Milestones. A list of major tasks with accompanying suspense dates, it includes life cycle phase start and stop dates, dates when specified system safety products are due, dates of formal reviews, and any other relevant dates. 

System Safety Requirements. Specify the system safety products to be produced, the risk assessment code matrix to be used, risk acceptability criteria, and residual risk acceptance procedures. 

System safety continues, in many cases, to be more of an art than a science. The quality of system safety products is determined by the skill and talent of the individual analyst, not by the systematic application of accepted tools and techniques. 

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