Welcome, and how this works

This course takes about 40 minutes. You can stop at any point and pick up where you left off.

It is for anyone who changes something, approves a change or works with the result: engineers, maintainers, supervisors, superintendents, planners, project people and managers.

The observation the course is built on

Most serious incidents happen after a change. Not because the change was reckless, but because the controls that were keeping people safe were designed around conditions that quietly stopped being true.

So the question in any change is never only “what could go wrong with the new thing”. It is “which of our existing controls just stopped being true”, and that question is much less often asked.

What it covers

• What actually counts as a change, which is wider than most systems recognise
• Why change invalidates controls rather than only adding hazards
• The steps of a change assessment that is worth doing
• Who should approve what, and why it should not be the person who wants it
• Temporary changes, which is where most of the harm is
• Organisational and people change, treated as real change
• The post-implementation review, which nearly everybody skips

Before you start

This course assumes the vocabulary from Introduction to Risk Management: the risk management process, the hierarchy of control and what makes a control critical. That course is free and takes 40 minutes. If you own a risk or a critical control, Risk Owner and Critical Control Owner are the companions to this one.

What it is not

General guidance on method, not legal advice, and not a replacement for your own organisation’s change procedure, which will have its own forms, thresholds and approval levels. If your organisation has a management of change procedure, use it. This course is about doing it well rather than instead.