How to use

Risk assessment runs in a circle: the office requests an assessment, the vessel carries it out, the office releases it depending on the risk, it stays valid for a while, expires, and is requested again. This page gives the order in which the subject is best learned.

The functions are described in the documentation under Risk Management, the settings under Configuration > Risk Assessment, and the way through the whole circle in the Risk Assessment Workflow.

Suggested order

1. Set up the catalogs before the first assessment. Hazard categories, hazards, operation types, operation groups and operations are the vocabulary everything else is written in. An assessment built on a hastily created operation is hard to correct afterwards, because other assessments already refer to it.
2. Then the risk matrix. It decides what a combination of likelihood and severity means, and it has to be approved and set as default before it can be used. A matrix already in use can no longer be changed — that is deliberate, and it is why the matrix deserves a careful look before the first assessment rather than after the tenth.
3. Understand the folder structure. Open, assessed, approved, currently valid, closed — the folder tells you whose turn it is. Whoever knows the folders stops searching for assessments. See View.
4. Work through one assessment from end to end, in the order the tabs suggest: conditions, hazards, further actions, authorization, attachments. See Create a Risk Assessment.
5. Rate a hazard three times, deliberately — as it stands, with the existing measures, and with the additional ones you propose. That sequence is what makes the assessment readable later: it shows not only how high the risk is, but what brought it down.
6. Then learn the release side: what happens after Assess, which risk levels the office has to approve, and how it is notified. See Office Approval.
7. Last the special cases — extraordinary assessments and the approval of the operations and hazards they bring with them, versioning, distribution to the fleet, and the check for re-opening.

Good to know beforehand

Templates are the normal case, not the exception. Most assessments start from one, and a template written well once saves the same work on every vessel. See Templates.

An assessment expires. A routine one stays valid, a non-routine one only 24 hours after its approval. Assessments that have run their course are closed overnight, and requested ones are reissued automatically — so an assessment appearing on board is often the successor of one that just expired, not a new task.

What the vessel invents, the office approves. An extraordinary assessment may introduce operations and hazards that do not exist yet. They stay unapproved until the office decides, which is what keeps the fleet-wide catalog from filling up with three spellings of the same thing. See Approving Hazards and Operations.

Duplicates can be merged, not only deleted. Two hazards that mean the same thing are merged into one, and the assessments hanging on them move over with it — deleting and re-entering would lose that link.