Operational readiness for the integrated management of changes in the industrial organizations - Assessment approach and results

Management of change (MOC) is part of process safety management. Traditionally, MOC is related to technical changes. Safety implications from organizational changes have recently led to proposed integrated management of both types. Inadequate or absent MOC is often among of the causes of major accidents in the process industry, as a plethora of textbook and recent cases clearly demonstrate. Despite the lack of attention in industry and in the scientific literature, complexity in MOC plays an important role in ensuring process safety. We propose a new approach for the evaluation of the organizational readiness on the key principles and essential features of the safety change management (that integrates technical and organizational changes). We build on a merge of the Nertney's wheel principles of assessing the pre-defined stages of operational readiness of the elements of the system in question - safety change management (based on the literature/guidelines). The approach and prepared audit type tool were applied and tested in six case industrial organizations in Europe. Results of the testing suggest that the approach can reveal potential specific gaps in MOC procedures and practices, as well as provide aggregated results (e.g., for the purpose of reporting, benchmarking and risk communication, alignment of management activities). The obtained results also re-confirmed the literature that the overall readiness of safety change management in industry is in its infancy. The research contributes to the literature and practice by pointing out how to assess, aggregate and possibly align the MOC performance data for better risk management.