When management are pressing for a schedule to be maintained and telling people that the ‘deadline must be met’, they would do well to pause for thought. It’s management that’s responsible for the performance of our people in the field. Recently in the media we’ve seen some notable examples of safety management failure in the shipping industry – but the …

Unless you’re like the retail business manager who once told me that he was ‘making way too much money to worry about cutting costs’, cost management simply aims to achieve the most cost-effective way of delivering your goods or services to a given level of quality. Cost management isn’t about reducing quality or short-changing customers. The low-cost airlines are arguably …

Any competent directors will want to comply with the law when managing SHE, but directors will also want to protect the reputation of themselves AND their business from the adverse publicity that a serious accident would bring. Directors and managers will want to avoid undue pressure arising from employees, trade unions and customers because of poor safety and health management …

Business managers may see there’s a cost involved in implementing good HSE systems and there is. However, there’s an enormous cost of not doing it properly. Here at Certainty Software we’ve developed a powerful auditing and inspection tool that’s guaranteed to reduce the cost of managing HSE. This month we’re offering a FREE trial – so be sure to take …

The key purpose of this blog series is to help ‘cross-fertilise’ ideas and opinions from one industry sector to another. This week we’re looking at the mining sector and reflect on some of the challenges presented there. We found this great article in support of checklists and recommend you read it in full here,  – my point is you may …

Modern healthcare is an industrial process just like any other. Whether we like it or not, when we go into hospital for surgery we must submit to a process. Quite probably, dozens of individuals are going to get involved in our care. Some of those people will have direct continuous involvement in our care and others will have more peripheral …

You may think that you don’t need to use checklists because you already know what to do or because you’ve done it a hundred times before. But even though you may have done so yourself or you’ve told other people what to do, it’s only human nature to make mistakes or to try and take short-cuts. Those mistakes or short-cuts …

No blog series on checklists can be complete without addressing the resistance that some (many?) people will have to using them. It’s one thing for you to be convinced of the merits of checklists, but if your colleagues don’t think they’re a clever idea, then you’re going to have a struggle on your hands. We need to look at some …