2012 Q6 Competence Management System

[PJW]

I have also attempted the same question, feedback appreciated.


I have already added some comments having read previous attempts.

6a.
Nothing really to add to those comments you have already gleaned.
Probably more emphasis on the initial stage of defining what competencies are actually needed to undertake a particular role.


6b.
Little to add here either; think I'd have made reference to Underpinning Knowledge to distinguish it from that which is immediately needed to perform the actual headline task in ideal circumstances.

6c.
Ditto.  
Wonder if the "informal review" is actually using the Competence Management System (which surely is the formal process)?
Answer focused only on post incident investigation, but think should have considered in wider context.
A model example I think is the way that NR signallers in turn routinely review the recorded conversations of their peers and there is a continual improvement process re the clarity of safety critical communications; there is a lot that signal engineers could learn from this.


In the real world, I think it is very difficult.  Such things tend to come to light only after there has been an incident and almost invariably a lot of people are involved none of whom is entirely blame free and have not always done everything that they should and generally have done something they shouldn't.  However the environment is such that the world isn't perfect and if everyone always followed every instruction to the letter then no one could actually do anything.  So people use their common sense and end some rules a bit and everyone does it and is broadly happy, perhaps for years. Then there is incident because sooner or later "the holes in the Swiss cheese" just happened to line up- so do you judge the people who happened to be involved on this occasion as "incompetent" when in fact acted no differently to others who are still deemed competent because they had the good fortune not to be involved on the thing that went wrong?
Then what about the person who simply made an honest oversight on one occasion; does that in itself put them outside the normal range.  We are all human and no one gets everything right every time.  

Hence to me a Competence Management System ought to be taking far more notice of whatever indications there can be of a person's continual level of performance (e.g. the number and type of Check Logs raised against a designer during the routine checking of their work, then the Test Logs subsequently being raised on the design) than focusing excessively on the more dramatic discovery of an error because of a serious incident.

I am sure that we can both think of a particular case in which:
a) a designer missed something when producing Control Tables from a not well presented initial Scheme Plan,
b) a checker identified that error, which was then corrected,
c) however another designer had meanwhile produced data to the pre-checked Control Tables but believed that these hadn't changed since the draft version so never revisited,
d) the original checker then inexplicably failed to identify the consequent omission from the data which they had themselves realised had affected the Control Tables,
and a similar sequence of "nearly but not quite" continued throughout the entire testing process which led to something highly undesirable being commissioned.........

No one proud of their involvement, but
1. at what point does the normal variation and lack of perfection of human performance actually become incompetent?
2. what would have been gained by restricting anyone's specified competence to continue to undertake such work.  Reality is that the staff involved had all had a personal wake-up call and therefore not only less likely to do the same again but indeed less likely than others to make such a mistake in future....
3. what is the advantage of "punishing" someone for making a mistake that they didn't want to make in the first place?

So my personal view is that one should do more continual routine monitoring but only take significant action after an incident where someone knowingly acted recklessly or whose performance clearly fell well below that which one would expected from the average person of that defined competence when placed into that scenario.

End of Rant.