The human-factors approach in the oil and gas industry is still an emerging science compared with other industries; most human-factors publications in the oil and gas industry focus their application on the design stage. Human-factors methods, however, can be applied at any stage, helping to bridge the gap between work imagined and work done. This paper aims to provide an alternative approach in a service company’s complex activity for hazard identification and risk assessment.
A commonly used tool, the Human Reliability Assessment (HRA), includes human factors in a risk-assessment process; however, this method is time consuming and not easily adopted without extensive effort spent on training and operationalization. The approach proposed by the authors represents a simplified method focusing on key factors from Human Error Assessment and Reduction Technique (HEART), relevant to the nature of the service company’s operations. This is integrated into the existing qualitative risk assessment to recalculate the overall risk of a certain task. The process and the template for risk assessment is modified to include sections for human factors.
Ongoing field rollout tests show positive indications in regard to improved error capturing for error-producing conditions during the task that will be consolidated by end of the first quarter of 2018 after field tests. A modified risk-assessment approach will reshape the standard risk-assessment practices, moving the focus to and targeting the inherent unreliability of the task as a result of error-producing conditions caused by unavoidable human interactions within complex systems. This method will include a matrix for measuring operators’ understanding of the potentially existing risk through a dedicated questionnaire. This matrix measures improvements in the overall understanding of risk involved from the front line employees’ prospective. Expected benefits also include further improvements for risk assessment training and competency by the company. The hypothesis is that introducing key human-performance factors to the risk assessment will help build awareness of human factors and their relationship to the probability of an existing risk. Using an already effective system—risk assessment—to introduce human-factors methods will help avoid the complexity associated with its implementation and still get the benefit of key elements of a well-established method.
This approach compares a standard risk assessment with one with integrated human factors. This comparison allows for assessing the gap between work-imagined and work-done practices and for feedback from front-line employees as end-users of company procedures. This paper provides insights on how human factors can affect the level of risk and outlines the control measures targeted at such factors that can be missed if a standard risk assessment is applied.
Human factors have been subject to several studies in recent years, yet injecting such studies in the oil and gas field, in particular, is considered young or early compared with the progress made in human factors in other industries such as nuclear or aviation. This work will follow the definition of “human factors” by the International Ergonomics Association, which defines it as follows: “Ergonomics (or human factors) is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system and the profession that applies theory, principles, data, and other methods to design in order to optimize human wellbeing and overall system performance.” Basically, we are analyzing to improve the way humans behave physically and psychologically in relation to particular work environments and work conditions. Most of the papers discussing human factors in oil and gas are focusing on its introduction throughout the design stage and the future interactions between human and equipment at an early stage of the project to make it more error-free and user-friendly. In the oil and gas industry, it is not common for frontline workers to relate how human factors are affecting their day-to-day tasks for a simple fact: the dynamic nature of their oilfield work, which is typically related to post-manufactured products, equipment, and services with multiple various setups of complex systems, products, and services. Human factors, however, continues to play a major role and has a huge effect on the day-to-day operation of frontline workers, especially at the intersection of multiple oilfield players (operator, driller, and service provider), increasing their level of risk exposure and, hence, increasing the probability of human mistakes leading to accidents. Therefore, it is paramount for a safety-cautious company to consider human factors not only at the initial designing stage but also throughout a full cycle of the value chain, including execution. The objective of this paper is to provide insights on how human factors can be integrated effectively into day-to-day operations of frontline workers in the oil and gas industry.
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