Bow Tie Analysis and ALARP Demonstration Workshop
Making barrier thinking useful rather than decorative
Bow tie diagrams are widely drawn and frequently useless, because barriers get placed on the diagram that would not stop anything. This workshop builds bow ties that carry real barrier ownership and degradation controls, then uses them to construct an ALARP argument that will hold.
This course sits alongside our Bow Tie Risk Analysis consulting work, so what is taught is what we do.
Who should attend
Course content
Every module is taught with worked examples and exercises drawn from real plant, and adapted to your own process where the course runs in house.
Building a bow tie that means something
- Top event definition, and why most weak bow ties fail here
- Threats and consequences kept distinct from causes and effects
- Preventive and mitigative barriers, and the test each must pass
- Escalation factors and the controls that address them
Barrier quality
- Barrier types, from hardware through to procedural and behavioural
- Effectiveness, availability and reliability as separate questions
- Assigning a named owner to every barrier
- Barrier degradation and the indicators that reveal it early
ALARP demonstration
- Gross disproportion and what the factor actually means in practice
- Cost benefit analysis with a value of preventing a fatality
- Good practice as the starting point rather than the conclusion
- Documenting an argument a regulator can follow
Using bow ties in operation
- Linking barriers to maintenance, inspection and competency records
- Barrier based performance indicators
- Keeping the model current through management of change
- Where bow tie software helps and where it creates busywork
Workshop
- Delegates build a full bow tie for a major accident hazard on their own plant
- Peer challenge of barrier claims
- Drafting an ALARP argument for one identified gap
What you receive
- A bow tie template with the barrier tests built in
- A barrier ownership and degradation register format
- A worked ALARP cost benefit example
- The bow tie your team built during the workshop
- Assessment result and attendance record
What changes afterwards
- Barriers on the diagram are ones that would genuinely interrupt the sequence
- Every barrier has an owner who knows they own it
- ALARP arguments rest on analysis rather than assertion
- Barrier health becomes something the site can measure
Standards and references
We teach Bow Tie Analysis and ALARP Demonstration Workshop against CCPS and Energy Institute Bow Ties in Risk Management and the codes listed with it, at the edition current when you run it.
Run Bow Tie Analysis and ALARP Demonstration Workshop for your team
We will come back with dates, the pre-reading it needs and a cost per head. Tell us who is attending, what they already do day to day and whether you want it at your site or delivered online.
Ask about dates and cost