ABSTRACT
Everyone must understand how a change impacts the process safety risks and how the changes affect the other process safety systems. This chapter explores approaches on how better to understand and verify whether a proposed change has direct, an indirect, or no effect on the other process safety systems. Since changes can occur at all phases in an equipment's life cycle, it is essential that designers, fabricators, installers, operators, and maintainers of the processes and the equipment understand the reasons for the change and how their responsibilities and tasks may change. A company's process safety efforts will be at risk if organizations do not adequately address changes in its required staffing or reporting structure. The chapter concludes with an example summarizing how a facility's overall operational risk increased, in part, due to poor management of an organizational change when both the operational and maintenance staffs were reduced during an economic downturn.
