Safety Leadership Charter, Guiding Principle 3: “Guide the integration of safety into business strategies, processes, and performance measures.”
Background
Jetstar Airways has a Change Management process to ensure it meets desired outcomes while maintaining or improving safety performance.
Within this process, the airline uses a Business Impact Assessment (BIA) mechanism to help understand the organisational impacts across a number of categories, such as people, processes and systems.
There had been recent changes, where there was an impact to the deployment of a change, which pointed to the fact that BIA analysis hadn’t fully identified all relevant impacts.
Brief description of the initiative
Work was done to develop an improved BIA template to assist in identifying a more comprehensive set of impacts associated with change.
This template took the four key Impact Elements of People, Information Systems, Physical (Equipment, Facilities, Assets) and Process & Management Systems and supplemented these with prompting questions. These are used to promote more detailed discussion during preliminary change assessment workshops.
The template also includes Human Factor (HF) and Work Health & Safety (WHS) Screening questions to identify if specialist HF analysis would be required to implement the change, or if WHS activities, such as Health and Safety Representative consultation, would be required.”
A baseline BIA template was developed with the support of Subject Matter Experts. Trial period used this template during change safety assessments and provided feedback to help iterate and improve the design of the form.
What positive changes this initiative helped bring?
Jetstar Airways is seeing an overall improved quality of BIA analysis, in turn providing added assurance that the change activities are being appropriately managed, and risk is controlled and mitigated.
Next steps now include proceduralising the BIA and including this into relevant training, to ensure users have the capability to perform the BIA well.
Main challenges and lessons-learned
Don’t try to ‘gold plate’ the ideal template from the start – develop something that is fit for purpose for your organisation and trial it under a wide range of change activities, to gather insight and feedback for continuous improvement.
When implementing the template, ensure that it is backed with enough support material and resource, so that it gets the necessary buy in (i.e.: the instructions/procedure is detailed and user-friendly, training is available and specialist support resources can provide additional coaching/guidance).
