Risk Assessment Matrix Tool # 4

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About Hearts & Minds Program

The Hearts and Minds toolkit was developed by Shell E&P, based upon 20 years of university research, and is being successfully applied in both Shell and non-Shell companies around the world.
Hearts and Minds uses a range of tools and techniques to help the organization involve all staff in managing HSE as an integral part of their business.
Collectively, these tools and techniques are known as the Hearts and Minds Toolkit.

This state of the art toolkit is available to those outside the Shell Group, thanks to a publishing agreement between the Energy Institute and Shell E&P. The Hearts and Minds Toolkit has tools suitable for managers, team leaders and workforce at all levels, that are designed to work alongside any existing HSE tools your organisation may already use.

Why This Course?

A good appreciation of HSE risks in your area of responsibility helps to correctly direct resources for improvement. Risk Assessment Matrix (RAM) is a tool to rank and assess these risks, and discuss what changes need to be made so that the risk is as low as is reasonably practicable (ALARP).

Ensuring that risk is managed in a structured and rational way is a necessary part of a safety management system.

Rationalising risk in this way can help better allocate resources and ensure that adequate barriers are put in place to prevent incidents.

Applying RAM properly and frequently is a natural way to communicate and plan for HSE improvement. RAM can help managers better appreciate their personal roles in managing the HSE risk in their area of responsibility, and can help them come to a good understanding of their role in demonstrating risk is managed to ALARP levels.

Assessing the risk of a particular scenario should be done in sequence, i.e. first the potential consequences are estimated and only thereafter the likelihood of such consequences occurring are assigned. (A scale of consequences from 0 to 5 is used to indicate increasing severity).

After assessing the consequences, the likelihood on the horizontal axis is estimated on the basis of historical evidence or experience that such consequences occurred.

Ensure that the exercise involves people at all levels who are involved in the tasks being discussed as they will understand the problems and know which solutions will and will not work. But remember, you need to include those responsible for planning activities (managers and supervisors) otherwise changes may not happen.