Summary
Many oilfield companies require field crews to systematically analyze safety
aspects of their activities before starting work. Most commonly this process is
called a job safety analysis, or JSA.
Recent developments in measuring safety performance have changed the JSA
process by better defining its function, as explained in this paper. This
change provides major improvements and is rapidly gaining acceptance throughout
the Gulf of Mexico petroleum industry.
An informal survey of Gulf of Mexico offshore production facilities and
drilling rigs showed that JSAs tend to be viewed as a tedious formality that
crews comply with only because they are required to do so. For a typical jackup
drilling rig, adopting the new JSA process and its standards can reduce the
total time spent in JSA meetings from approximately 30 man-hours per day to
fewer than 4 man-hours per day. In general, work crews enthusiastically approve
of the new style of JSA because of the time savings and because it clarifies
key responsibilities. Where conventional JSAs simply identify things that
should happen, the new style causes things to happen, and the result is a
considerable reduction in the likelihood of accidents.
Introduction
Major oil companies often require their own employees, and most contractors,
to use a JSA process (although the process is sometimes referred to by another
name). The crux of the idea is that crews hold a meeting before beginning any
job, analyze the job, and decide what they can do to prevent accidents during
the job.
While visiting rigs, production facilities, construction sites, and other
work areas, a considerable difference between perception of implementation and
the actual implementation of JSAs was noted. For example, on one location the
noise level was so high outside the offices and quarters that everyone had to
wear hearing protection. The crew gathered and the supervisor read a JSA while
the crew members stood, unable to hear any of the JSA information. The crew
then completed the job and the supervisor filed a report stating that a JSA was
conducted according to the requirements of the company policy. It was no
surprise to find the crew was privately scoffing at the JSA process and viewed
it as bureaucratic excessiveness. Company health, safety, and environmental
departments often believe the JSA process is being followed and accepted
scrupulously by work crews; they may even identify records and testimonies that
support that conclusion, as in the example above. However, objective
observers who spend enough time with a work crew to gain their confidence often
find people privately confessing they see no benefit in the JSA process and
generally consider it a required-but-meaningless formality.
This situation is common throughout the industry: management sends out
strongly worded orders that a JSA must be conducted and they get back reports
that the order was followed, but what actually happens has little or no effect
on the probability of accidents. Because of this, it was necessary to
develop a better way to accurately gauge the effectiveness of a JSA
program.
A JSA is valuable only if it prevents accidents, but even without a JSA,
most jobs would not result in an accident. That makes it hard to determine
if the JSA made a real difference. The problem is amplified by official or
unofficial programs that encourage employees to hide accidents or to change
their records. In many instances, accident reports are distorted to make the
occurrence of accidents seem less frequent than they really are. How, then, can
management better determine whether a given accident report decreased the
chances of that particular accident occurring again? How, then, can we prove
that a JSA actually decreased the chances of accidents occurring?
Effective JSAs produce the same corrective actions produced by a good
accident report. The only difference is that the JSA determines the corrective
action before, rather than after, the accident occurs. Therefore, the
effectiveness of a JSA can be measured by the exact process used to measure the
effectiveness of corrective actions in accident reports (Veley 2002). This
means that an effective JSA is a plan, or a prearranged schedule of events
leading to a particular objective. To meet theis definition, a JSA must
produce specific things to do that will become corrective actions when they are
assigned.
© 2006. Society of Petroleum Engineers
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History
- Original manuscript received:
6 July 2004
- Revised manuscript received:
18 April 2005
- Manuscript approved:
24 April 2005
- Version of record:
20 May 2006
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