CASE STUDY
Health and safety effectiveness audit
Client: Coal producer
Location: Central Queensland
Duration: Three weeks
Context
Like many organisations, our client’s health and safety team was working to capacity delivering its regular operational responsibilities. When an independent safety audit identified a number of serious compliance issues and shortfalls, our client needed a way to quickly address the gaps, reduce its risk, and meet its statutory requirements. The health and safety team wasn’t resourced to take on the additional urgent work without compromising the site’s day-to-day business activities. With this in mind, Minset was engaged to provide short-term support, address the audit requirements, and build an actionable implementation plan ready for the local team to execute.
Approach
The situation called for a highly practical and pragmatic solution delivered in just a matter of weeks. A Minset expert with industry health and safety and process improvement experience reviewed the audit findings, assessed the risks, and swiftly adopted a project management philosophy. This approach provided clarity by prioritising key pieces of work, taking resourcing constraints into consideration, and engaging local leaders and teams to help design a realistic and sustainable implementation plan.
Minset’s high-intensity program:
- Reviewed existing processes and systems to determine if issues were due to process deficiencies or a lack of discipline in applying those processes.
- Added value by identifying and implementing audit actions as Minset triaged project tasks. This led to just under 40% of the audit actions being implemented within two weeks.
- Leveraged Minset’s library of tools so the client could use or adapt existing templates quickly and easily.
- Tracked and monitored progress using the site’s existing computer systems. This gave site leaders excellent visibility of the work being done and results being achieved.
The Minset team also shared their network of specialist providers. This helped the client manage material risks and principal hazards and continue implementing audit outcomes after the project ended.
Results
People
- Involved site teams to create buy-in and build understanding
- Engaged leaders throughout the process to boost support for delivery
Process
- Quickly developed an implementation plan for leaders and the site team to execute
- Accessed the existing site systems to track progress and share data in meetings
Physical
- Assessed audit findings and identified corrective actions
- Built the implementation plan ready for management endorsement
- Completed 38 of the 100 corrective actions in two weeks while on site
