2011 Q7 Risk of Human Error affecting safety

[PJW]

Attached is a file containing the combined offerings of the participants at the recent Mod1/Mod7 Exam Workshop who attempted this question.

[asrisaku]

Hi Anyone

Please give some feedback if possible.

Thanks

Best regards
Arnut

[PJW]

Hi Anyone

Please give some feedback if possible.

Thanks

Best regards
Arnut

Sorry for the delay; I have been very busy, on leave and a lot of people also contacting me by various means to support them for the exam at the last minute!

I liked the presentation very much.  Good use of diagrams and short annotations to prevent having to write too much English prose.  Very clear presentation to the examiner of the 3 ways you are saying that Human Error can influence safety; also show the various types of error in each of the 3.  Method of presentation makes it possible to add another later if it occurs to you when writing something else.  You did very well if you did each of those diagrams with annotations in 3 minutes apiece.

In the part B again I liked presentation; you very clearly show the structure of your answer.  very much shows that you can answer the exam well without writing an essay.   There is maximum content and no waffle.  You also used your little sketches (e.g the single cut circuit and the ALARP triangle) to good effect

I think that if I were answering the pt A question, I would not have split it in the 3 ways you chose to do, but your split I think is perfectly valid.  In a sense you have the driver errors giving an incident almost immediately, the maintenance errors likely to lead to incident after an indefinite period and the design errors being their latent from when commissioned, perhaps not manifesting themselves for years.

For part B the thing that I think it would have been made your answer even better would have been some reference to whether the various mitigation were addressing the likelihood of the occurrence or trying to minimise its consequences - for example whereas ATP ought to prevent the SPAD occurring, TPWS basically does not but does attempt to stop the train within the overlap and it would have been good to bring out such distinctions more clearly.

Overall though there is a lot of information, it seems to be relevant and to answer the question asked and is very clearly presented so I think that this answer would score very highly.  Well done!