Aligning MoD POSMS safety and POEMS environmental risk approaches — Experience and guidance

The alignment between safety and environment risk assessment processes has been done for one UK MoD Land Systems defence project and this paper provides a record of that along with guidance on how this alignment may be done for other programmes. The rest of this paper is arranged as follows; section 1 gives an introduction; section 2 looks at the POSMS and POEMS procedure descriptions of severity and likelihood; section 3 considers how the POSMS and POEMS procedures differ in their construction of risk tolerability matrices; and discusses potential issues and difficulties concerned with the alignment process; section 4 describes how the alignment process has been followed through on an existing Land project; and section 5 captures some guiding principles for carrying out future alignment processes in other programmes.