Säkerhetsvärdering av organisationsförändringar vid storskalig kärnteknisk verksamhet Problem, utmaningar och förslag på lösning
Sammanfattning: This study addresses safety issues related to organizational change within safety critical operations, focusing on large-scale nuclear technology operations.Failures in safety critical operations can lead to unacceptable consequences for both man and environment. Given this, a decreased safety level due to organizational change is undesirable. It is, however, estimated that about 75 % of all general organizational changes fail to achieve the goals that are set up for the change (Boonstra, 2004). It is thus important to evaluate the safety impact of a proposed organizational change before it can be accepted for implementation. There is, however, a lack of methods for evaluating the safety impact due to organizational change, and there is also a need for developing knowledge in this field. The dissertation hence concerns safety evaluation of organizational change, with the general aim to develop knowledge in the area of safety evaluation of organizational change, and also to develop a method for safety evaluation of organizational change.In the thesis, a literature review is presented which deals with significant parts of three areas relevant for the above aim: organizational change, decision theory, and safety science.The empirical parts of the study can be divided into two parts. The first part is concerned with the identification of the dynamic aspects of organizational change in nuclear technology organizations. This part was performed by collecting and analyzing data from an already implemented organizational change. The data sources were primarily interviews, internal organizational documentation, and one survey.The second part is concerned with the development and application of a method for evaluating the safety impact due to organizational change. This part was performed by departing from an action research framework, and the developed method was applied to two different but related organizational changes in nuclear technology organizations. The results from the second part primarily concerned experiences related to applying the method for safety evaluation.In the light of the answers to the research questions that were set up for the study some important results are presented. One important result is the developed method, validated from an action research perspective. Other important results are the identification of situations that affect the rational decision making process when performing a safety evaluation, and the presentation of some reasons that explains why these situations occur. Other important tentative conclusions, primarily drawn from the literature review of the study, are that there might be an inherent contradiction between common routines for organizational change processes versus risk- and safety analysis, and that there might also be a contradiction between safety culture and the management literature encouragement of risk taking.
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