Making Process Safety Management Work

I am quoting excerpts from a recent speech by Mr Bob Dudley (Group CEO, BP) that is on the BP website
“We have created a powerful, central safety and operational risk organization headed by Mark Bly, who led our internal investigation of the accident. Mark reports directly to me and sits on our executive team.
His organization has the resources and the mandate to drive safe, reliable, and compliant operations, including intervention rights, in BP’s exploration and production operations anywhere in the world.
The new organization is now in action across BP in four main areas:
First, it is strengthening and clarifying requirements for safe, compliant and reliable operations.
Second, it is deploying around 500 specialist personnel within our businesses to guide, advise, and if necessary, intervene.
Third, it is providing deep technical expertise to our operating businesses.
And fourth, it is intervening where needed to stop operations and bring about corrective actions.
We are already seeing results.
For example, we have shut in one production platform to repair the fire water pumps. Another platform was shut down after the discovery of incorrect specifications for some fasteners. And a producing field was shut down to enable pipeline integrity work to be carried out. Further, we have decided we will not take rigs that do not conform to our standards and there are a number of cases where we have either turned away rigs or are negotiating for modifications which could bring the rig up to our standards.
We are conducting a major review of our risk management systems to ensure we have consistent standards that are applied in a disciplined way across BP.
And in support of all of this, we are linking our performance management and reward system directly to safety and risk management - as well as to key behaviours – teamwork, capability-building, listening and compliance with standards.
We will focus on the critical inputs that drive delivery, namely safety, capability, technology and relationships, rather than focussing primarily on outputs such as production barrels. If we get these right, then the outputs, including dollars, will follow. So we are emphasizing quality over quantity and value over volume.
We also learned a lot about what crisis management means in a world of 24 hour communications with massive social media coverage as well as conventional press and cable broadcasting. I saw how much pressure there is on everyone to take up polarized positions and over-simplify the issues”. 

The above points mentioned by the CEO has tremendous significance on Process Safety. I am postulating some simple rules if you want process safety to work:
1. You must be prepared to walk the talk if you want process safety to succeed.
2. Technical expertise is the key to maintaining process safety. Just having standards and a system is not enough. You must have technically competent people who understand the implications of the standards.
3. The board of directors must have direct access to technically competent people who can translate risks and their implications to them. 
4.Your organizational framework must institutionalize process safety management
5. If process safety is taken care of, profits will automatically follow. This lesson is most important for the people who control the purse strings!

Read the complete speech in this link.