Welcome, and how this works
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This course takes about 45 minutes. You can stop at any point and pick up where you left off.
It is for anyone appointed to own a critical control: supervisors, superintendents, operational managers, maintenance leads and engineering leads. It is written for high-consequence work, so the examples lean towards mining, processing and heavy industry.
What you are here to do
A critical control owner is accountable for one control performing to its standard, and for its condition being known by the people who need to know it.
Not the risk. Not the other controls. Not whether the event happens. One control, performing, with its condition visible. That narrowness is the strength of the role.
What it covers
- What the accountability actually is, and how it differs from owning the risk
- The difference between a control, a supporting activity and a verification activity, which is the most confused idea in this field
- What makes a control critical, and what that designation buys you
- Critical Control Performance Standards, and how to write one that can be tested
- Owning it day to day, including bypasses and handover
- Verification, and the evidence it has to produce
- What to do the day you find your control is not performing
- Reporting upward, and where control ownership reliably goes wrong
Before you start
This course assumes you know what a critical control is and roughly how it sits in a bow tie. If that is unfamiliar, take Introduction to Risk Management first, which is free and takes 40 minutes. If you are the person who assigns controls rather than owns one, Risk Owner is the companion course to this one.
What it is not
General guidance on the accountability, not legal advice, and not a replacement for your own organisation’s critical control framework, which will have its own templates, thresholds and names. Owning a control is an organisational accountability that sits alongside whatever legal duties apply to you rather than replacing them.