Adding 'ilities' to Capability Maturity Modeling: The Safety CMM

摘要

Building a strong behavior-based safety culture within an organization is accomplished by evaluating its current safety climate and designing organizational changes in a way that will prevent occupational injuries, minimize work-related illnesses, and promote better safety practices. The organizational changes must be integrated across the complete business environment in order for safety to become truly institutionalized. Currently, few approaches to safety improvement are effectively integrated. To address this need the INEEL is developing a new method entitled Safety Capability Maturity Appraisal. This work is based on a popular approach used by the Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration to evaluate organizational, management, and technical performance. The approach uses an extensive normative questionnaire to establish a baseline of organizational performance, then conducts exploratory interviews with a sample of the organization's personnel to gain greater understanding of the underlying cultural issues that prevent change. An organization is scored on a maturity scale that measures its current capability to perform work in a systematic manner. Finally, an organizational intervention plan is designed and implemented that includes simultaneous changes to organizational, management, and technical business areas. Although Capability Maturity approaches have been used successfully, they currently lack the ability to assess the component of safety within an organization. Our current research is testing a comprehensive set of safety-related questions that we have added to an existing Capability Maturity model. An experimental design will be used to determine the extent to which a safety capability maturity appraisal can provide valid information for the design and implementation of timely organizational changes that enhance both business and safety related practices. The initial research will be performed at Yellowstone National Park during the first quarter of 2001.