System Safety Workshop

In February, 2006, APT hosted a workshop to determine what constitutes "goodness" in a system safety program. The results of the workshop are summarized below.

The discipline of System Safety would benefit from a standardized approach to define measures of System Safety practices (e.g., integrity, maturity, competency, capabilities, effectiveness).
These measures should be useful to express the current state of the practice and the path ahead toward continuous improvement.
There was general agreement that: - The discipline has potential for significant improvement?- System Safety is predominately at Level 1
System Safety measures can be defined to assess a program or an organization.
A CMMI-like approach is preferred to provide a framework to organize the assessment. Such a system could be used for enhancing interfaces of programs, organizations, or international cooperation.
The group identified three primary categories of measures as an effective paradigm: people, tools, and procedures/methods.
The draft matrix captures a set of metrics which points toward excellence.
The draft set of 140 questions can be used to gather information about the current state of a program or organization.