The Secret to Feeling Confident During a 3rd-Party Audit or Assessment
I was recently talking with one of our TapRooT® RCA clients, and she shared how successful her latest American Petroleum Institute assessment went. If you’ve been through that process, you know performance is evaluated across 10 distinct elements.
Understanding the API Pipeline SMS Assessment
During a Pipeline SMS (PSMS) assessment, a team of independent, third-party safety management system experts, or assessors, spends about a week at an operator’s site, working with employees and leadership (across operations and in the field) to fully understand the current pipeline safety processes, programs, and systems.
The 10 elements are:
- Leadership and Management Commitment
- Stakeholder Engagement
- Risk Management
- Operational Controls
- Incident Investigation, Evaluation, and Lessons Learned
- Safety Assurance
- Management Review and Continuous Improvement
- Emergency Preparedness and Response
- Competence, Awareness, and Training
- Documentation and Record Keeping
The Pipeline SMS Assessment is designed to evaluate an operator’s progress in the conformance, implementation, effectiveness, proactiveness, and maturity of their PSMS. They give a score from 1 to 5. Five is the strongest score.
A Strong Result in Incident Investigation and Lessons Learned
The element that this TapRooT® RCA Program owner is responsible for is Incident Investigation, Evaluation, and Lessons Learned. The organization scored a 4.5 out of 5 on that element. When I congratulated her on the result of their hard work, she said TapRooT® RCA was a big help.
She said the assessors were happy to hear that they provided their investigation team with TapRooT® RCA training. They said it was great to see that they had an industry-recognized incident investigation and standardized RCA methodology and tools written into their investigation policy, and put it into practice. It helped with the scoring.
The TapRooT® RCA Program owner was able to show the assessors how the evidence they collected during investigations drove the RCA. It wasn’t guesswork, opinions, or experience that drove the analysis. Facts drove the analysis. The root causes uncovered were defensible. Corrective action filled the gaps in systems. Strengthening the systems helped performance and reduced risk.
Building Confidence Through Training
The TapRooT® RCA Program owner provides the 5-Day TapRooT® Advanced RCA Training to her team. If you want to feel confident that 3rd party auditors, or anyone for that matter, will be impressed by your incident investigation and RCA results, you should also attend TapRooT® RCA training. You’ll get the human performance and equipment reliability knowledge required to gather the evidence needed for an effective RCA. You’ll also get the RCA tools that standardize the process for consistent and reliable results.
Attending a TapRooT® RCA public course is the best way to evaluate our training. This is an inexpensive way to learn about TapRooT®, see the system in use, talk to a knowledgeable practitioner in person, and walk through one of your examples during the class. Plus, you will be fully trained to conduct investigations once you get back to the company.
But we are always happy to send an instructor to your site if you have 10 or more people who need the training.
View the full course descriptions of the 5-Day TapRooT® RCA Advanced Training and our 2-Day TapRooT® RCA Essential Training, and view our upcoming public courses.
