End-to-End Assurance

In a recent change of Ministry of Defence policy, endorsed by the Second Permanent UnderSecretary and soon to be published in JSP 815 (ref. 1), the Department’s Functional Safety Boards have been asked to take on a new remit: providing End-to-End assurance of safety. But what does this mean? And how will it affect day-to-day business in the Department? This paper describes the Ship Safety Board response to the End-to-End challenge. Introduction Governance is the business of governing an organisation: setting its goals, directing how they will be met and monitoring progress. Assurance is the feedback part of governance. It is the process that gives confidence that the policies set by senior managers are actually being carried out. A large part of assurance is the normal management process of reporting risk, opportunity and performance information back up the line management chain. This can be considered “bottom-up” assurance, flowing vertically through the management hierarchy. Bottom-up assurance gives senior managers the confidence that their direction has flowed down to lower levels of the organisation by reporting the results back up the same communication path. By aggregating results at each organisational level, bottom-up assurance can achieve 100% coverage of the Department’s business. The disadvantage of the simple form of bottom-up assurance is that it can smack of “marking your own homework”. Because assurance is reported by the people who are responsible for doing the work (also referred to as “ensurance”), it potentially suffers from a number of flaws. Problems may not be recognised and highlighted either due to groupthink 1 , lack of experience in a particular area, or because people are less likely to notice their own mistakes. There may also be a temptation to filter bad news out of reports. For these reasons, independent assurance is often sought in businesscritical areas such as safety. The higher the risk involved, the greater the level of independence that is required to give adequate assurance that the business is being appropriately managed. The MOD has set up Functional Safety Boards (FSBs) to provide the Secretary of State, through 2 nd PUS, with independent assurance about the level of safety performance and the effectiveness of safety management in every area of the Department. By supporting bottom-up assurance through techniques such as audits, the work of the FSBs has had some success in building confidence in the Department's processes, but this approach has its drawbacks. Bottom-up assurance gives confidence that separate areas of the business are performing effectively, or in accordance with a standard. However, it does not give much confidence that different organisational units are working together to deliver the top-level outcomes desired by senior management. The introduction of the new offence of Corporate Manslaughter (ref. 2) has raised managers’ awareness that safety must be managed effectively across the business, not just in isolated areas. Safety is an emergent property that is not a function of any one component of a system or organisation. It is the product of the interaction of many different components. End-to-End (E2E) assurance attempts to give confidence that the whole Department (and its suppliers) are working together. 1 A process of reasoning or decision-making by a group, especially one characterized by uncritical acceptance or conformity to a perceived majority view.