ABOUT US
Pegasus Risk Management was jointly founded in 2013 by Peter V. Bridle (a former senior executive from the upstream oil and gas industry) and continues to grow into a group of dedicated, highly experienced consultants with wide and diverse backgrounds in the areas of Operational Risk and Organizational Transformation. We're here to help all of our clients and their unique needs achieve step changes in Operational Risk and HSE management and transform cultures of "casual compliance" into high reliability organizations.
No challenge is too big or too small for us. Our goal is simply to deliver
world-class, innovative solutions toward stubborn Human Performance challenges
related to the management of Operational Risk and HSE management.
In short, Pegasus picks up where most others leave off...
Are Occupational Injury Metrics - such as the Total Recordable Injury Rate (TRIR) - ever a good measure for Process Safety or the management of Major Operating Risks?
Probably not…. TRIR can be a useful measure of personal safety or occupational injuries and illnesses. However, when TRIR rates are high (e.g. > 3) they are a much better indicator of overall safety performance than when TRIR rates are relatively low (i.e. < 1). This is because as data points become fewer, they increasingly are subjected to random variation and as a consequence, operating and HSE performance can be seriously misrepresented. In any event, in the management of Process Safety and Major Operating Risk, the focus is much more on the availability and integrity of key "barriers" to prevent or recover from a major unplanned release such as the loss of containment. Such barriers are designed, operated and maintained to ensure that they are always fit for purpose, fully functional and available. In other words, metrics for barrier integrity are much more linked to performing work correctly vs. occupational injury metrics where the focus is more directed to the safe execution of work (without injury or exposure).
For example, if an employee is injured while undertaking maintenance on a deluge system, TRIR could be a useful metric to record the seriousness of the actual injury incurred. But when viewed through a Process Safety lens, the focus switches to whether the the work was performed to the correct standard such that the barrier (the deluge system) was maintained correctly such that it is available and functions as expected.
Applying Stop Work Authority (SWA): The Worksite vs. The Boardroom
Many organizations support a Stop Work Authority (SWA) program. The idea being that rather than continuing on with something that doesn’t look or feel right, employees should stop the work.
However, if a supervisor is under pressure to get the job done, then having an employee(s) electing to
shut-in the work for what may be an extended period of time, is unlikely to be met very favourably. Consequently the effectiveness of Stop Work Authority (SWA) is often a product of the overall operating culture of the organization. But the operating culture is not shaped and formed necessarily by worksite supervisors but more by the leadership and senior management teams. So for any SWA program to be effective at the sharp end, leaders need to "walk the talk". So this means it must equally be applied in the Boardroom when such things as budgets and resources are under scrutiny rather than predominantly being seen only as a tool for front-line workers.
Hazard Elimination? What Hazard?
Many organizations in high-risk industries utilize and routinely practice “Hazard Hunts”. The idea being to identify as many hazards as possible in a given amount of time and then decide what needs to be done to either eliminate or mitigate them. Sounds so simple and yet time and time again it invariably misses the point. Why?
Well, sadly this is often a classic case of doing without thinking. For example, take the oil and gas industry, the principal objective is to drill into, extract from and then produce pressurized, highly flammable liquids and gases. In other words, the oil and gas industry is in the business of looking for and producing something that in itself, is hazardous. So the whole concept of eliminating hazards from the worksite seems a little flawed when such operations are purposely designed to explore for, and produce such commodities. The same holds true for other industries such as mining. So in effect, the approach to hazard management in such situations is less about hazard elimination, but more about hazard control. To compound things further, the commonly practised definitions applied to "hazards" are often not clear. Hazards are always "situation and context" dependent, meaning where you are, what you’re doing and what you’re trying to prevent, changes how hazards are seen, assessed and managed. For example, the hazards associated with a construction worker performing a welding job on a new pipe being laid in a remote location (such as a desert), are clearly very different from the hazards for the exact same job being performed on an offshore platform where the pipe may previously have contained flammable pressurized liquids.
Learn more about Pegasus
Download our latest brochure (using the link below) and learn a little more about how Pegasus delivers game changing solutions to a wide variety of industries including Manufacturing, Pharmaceutical, Chemical, Power and Utilities as well as more traditional high-risk industries such as Mining, Petrochemical, Oil and Gas.
