While the PMBOK® Guide does not include a dedicated section to HSSE management, it is generally accepted as a primary component for managing construction projects. Safety and environmental management are not unique to construction projects and may be independent projects or programs within other industries. Because of the unique nature of construction projects, health and security considerations are generally included as part of safety and environmental management, all of which are incorporated under the umbrella of HSSE. This section of the Construction Extension presents HSSE considerations for managing, assuring, and controlling construction projects.
Note that some organizations do not include security in the title of the integrated management section, and refer to HSE to include Health, Safety, and Environmental Management. This section includes HSE within the broader context of HSSE used throughout this chapter.
14.1Project Health, Safety, Security, and Environment Management in Construction
The requirements of the Health, Safety, Security, and Environmental (HSSE) planning processes and activities are:
It is common for project sponsors or owners to invoke additional requirements, such as constraints specific to the geographic region and application area where the project is destined (may depend on the scale, scope, and complexity of the project); specific safety and environmental management systems standards, where general measures may be considered insufficient to provide the assurance and control required; and industry-specific codes and standards, which define specific project safety and environmental performance and acceptance criteria.
It should be noted that the absence of a specific HSSE management program or system does not necessarily mean that the system employed by the performing organization is ineffective. Likewise, having a safety and environmental management system or program does not mean the performing organization will produce compliant products or work.
Health, safety, security, and environment pertaining to construction are described as follows:
Project health, safety, security, and environmental management processes include all activities of the project sponsor/owner and the performing organization. These activities determine safety and environmental policies, objectives, and responsibilities to ensure the project is planned and executed in a manner that prevents accidents so as to avoid personal injury, fatalities, or property damage. For convenience, the term safety management is used throughout this Construction Extension to include both safety management and health management. Project safety and environmental management interacts with all other project management processes and Process Groups.
The performing organization implements the safety and environmental management system through the policy, procedures, and processes of planning, assurance, and control, and by undertaking continuous improvement activities throughout the project as appropriate. As with quality management, safety and environmental management ensures that the project management system employs all processes needed to meet project requirements, and that these processes take safety and the environment into consideration. Project safety and environmental management consists primarily of ensuring that the conditions of the contract (including those contained in legislation and any project technical specifications) are carried out to benefit the safety of both those working on site and in the vicinity of the project. It should address both the management of the project and the product of the project (and its component parts), including assessing and determining how the different project management processes interact to fulfill the needs of the project, and whether changes or improvements are needed to accomplish the safety and environmental objectives of the project. A proper and effective project management would be incomplete without due consideration of the requirements for safety and environmental management. Furthermore, both project safety and environmental management should be integrated with risk management processes in order to accomplish the stated objectives.
Health and security have additional impacts that are commonly overlooked but equally important to safety and environmental management. Delays and monetary losses, in addition to emotional distress, can be significant factors in both illness and serious injuries or fatalities. Managing the health and security of project resources should be identified and mitigated in the HSSE plan. For example, planning an 8-hour work day during high-heat periods may lengthen project duration yet lower risks to lost hours due to heat stroke and dehydration.
Project health, safety, and environmental management applies to all aspects of project management. As in the case of quality management, this broad application results in addressing three distinctive (and sometimes conflicting) sets of requirements, namely:
These processes interact with one another as well as with processes of other Knowledge Areas. Although the processes are presented here as discrete elements with well-defined interfaces, in practice they may overlap and interact in ways not detailed here.
14.1.1Health
Physical and mental health for construction projects typically includes several policies and controls to maintain a clean and healthy site. Typical challenges for the construction industry include a transient workforce and lack of site ownership by workers performing short-term activities at the site. Some methods for maintaining a healthy site include:
14.1.2Safety
Ensuring job site safety in the construction environment requires effective, safe work practices and procedures, with a priority focus on high-consequence and high-risk activities:
14.1.3Security
A secure job site allows only authorized access to construction zones and maintains security of the facility and grounds when no construction activities are under way. This can be established by use of constructed or natural barriers, technology, or the physical presence of security personnel. Some options for securing a construction work area are:
14.1.4Environment
Each construction project is typically located at a site with a unique set of environmental characteristics that require analyzing, planning, monitoring, and controlling. Several aspects of the environment should be considered, including:
14.2Project HSSE Management Planning
Health, safety, security, and environmental (HSSE) planning are overlapping and integral efforts. The HSSE planning process is aimed at providing a safe, secure, healthy work environment to prevent harm to people or damage to the environment. The HSSE policy should demonstrate commitment from senior-level management to these goals and incubate a culture that implements HSSE policies through all levels of the organization. Many government agencies involved in construction projects have well-established procedures and requirements that ensure HSSE policies are met. Employees, consultants, and contractors may be required to attend courses and certificate programs covering HSSE topics.
14.2.1Contract Requirements
Specifications, regulations, legislation, and standards (technical or legislative) are contractual requirements specific to construction projects. Some construction projects may have additional requirements due to their nature, complexity, or specific industry application area. For example, there are mandatory application-area-specific standards for construction within nuclear projects, oil and gas onshore and offshore projects, airport projects, military projects, etc. In the construction industry, these requirements issued by the project sponsor or owner include a project scope statement, a description of the product(s) of the project, and references to all applicable standards and regulations.
14.2.2Safety and Environmental Policy
The safety and environmental policy differs from the quality policy in that it dictates how construction activities should be conducted from a safety and environmental perspective. The safety and environmental management policy also includes the degree to which the performing organization's management is committed to social responsibility and environmental conservation issues, and can have a major impact on the effectiveness of a safety and environmental program.
14.2.3Safety Metrics
While many organizations determine which safety metrics are most important to track, the following metrics are globally recognized and should be included:
14.2.4Site Neighborhood Safety and Environmental Characteristics and Constraints
The characteristics of a construction site and its surrounding environment should be identified prior to project execution. For construction projects, the environment is the neighborhood where the project occurs, which may have constraints pertaining to safety management, quality management, and environmental management. These can include the proximity of adjacent residents, configuration of project offices, layout and location of construction equipment workshop, material delivery time constraints, traffic congestion in vicinity of the project site during peak periods, site security and access protocols, and noise restrictions, etc.
14.2.5Trials and Simulations
Trials and simulations used for safety and environmental projects include simulations of emergency response procedures to ensure that the controls developed are adequate to address those incidents identified as requiring an emergency response. They are dependent on industry application-area constraints and requirements (mining, oil and gas, etc.).
14.2.6Cost of Safety (COS) and Cost of Environment (COE)
The cost of environmental or safety noncompliance can be detrimental to a project if litigation, fines, or a job shutdown occurs. Compliance is typically mandatory. COS or COE is determined by a form of cost-benefit analysis that incorporates the potential impacts of noncompliance on the project. An important distinction is that safety is of paramount importance regardless of cost, and environment may have significant long-term impacts to consider.
Examples of COS and COE that could cause significant cost and schedule impacts include:
14.2.7Process Mapping
Process mapping is commonly combined with flowcharting to:
14.2.8Flowcharting
Flowcharting is commonly used with process mapping for construction projects and with certain process statistical analyses and reporting methods. Flowcharting identifies non-value-added activities or functions, or delay points in task activities, and defines particular control points in work execution (e.g., the issuance of a permit to enter prior to entering a confined space, or the need to obtain a certificate of occupancy prior to occupying the space).
14.2.9Project Safety and Environmental Requirements Review
Project requirements review includes an assessment and determination of:
When a requirement (standard or specification) is developed in one geographical region for use in another region, it is common for the characteristics and criteria of one region to differ in some degree from those in another location; as a result, the requirements generally reflect the constraints of the region of origin. Situations such as these have increased significantly in today's global economy. Compromise may be necessary, and may require the re-qualification of the requirements to ensure compliance. This compromise does not imply lowering standards for safety and environmental impacts, but illustrates that the same end result can be achieved by different methods. This should be scrutinized carefully so as not to compromise safety and environmental standards. Valid justification should be provided to project sponsors or owners, for obvious reasons.
Generally, all processes are analyzed to determine alternatives to increase effectiveness and efficiency. Examples are cost-benefit analyses and analyses in which time, cost, and safety and environmental considerations are balanced or even exceeded. Safety and environmental requirements can be mandatory constraints, as noncompliance can cause the project to have its execution permits canceled, revoked, or otherwise not issued. Furthermore, a failure in any aspect of safety or environmental management can manifest itself in more significant failures in quality or risk management.
14.2.10HSSE Management Plan
The project HSSE management plan defines the strategy or methodology to be adopted by the performing organization to undertake HSSE management and fulfillment of the project requirements. It is a subset of the overall project management strategy, methodology, and information system. The project HSSE management plan is a high-level strategic planning deliverable that defines the overall intentions and direction of the performing organization as expressed by top management, and is reviewed at various stages throughout the project. It may include the participation of the project sponsor/owner and other major project stakeholders, such as industry regulators and local, national, and federal government. The HSSE management plan can include but is not limited to:
14.2.11Safety and Environmental Zoning and Signage
Generally, a project site can be divided into specific zones (e.g., workshops, storage areas, the different areas of the construction job site, limited or controlled access areas, etc.), with each having its own safety requirements. The zoning of a particular area of a project site helps determine specific safety and environmental hazards or associated risks. Consequently, such signage can include general signage to warn of access restrictions or more specific signage to warn of particular hazards. This process utilizes the principle of visual operations management (VOM) to reinforce and repeat any specific instruction that would have been given during safety and environmental training and induction. It is also common to employ safety and environmental signage banks at specific access points where all necessary signage relating to a specific area of the project is cited. These banks would be subject to audit or inspection at regular intervals to ensure that all appropriate signs are present and determine whether any have been damaged or otherwise lost and are in need of replacement.
14.2.12Safety and Environmental Training and Induction Requirements
The requirements for safety and environmental training are generally divided into one of the following:
Critical to any safety and environmental program is the need to plan when elements of the program should be implemented to address specific parts of the project. Safety and environmental training planning is a subset of the human resources planning outputs.
14.2.13Traffic Management Plan
The traffic management plan defines the controls to be exercised over traffic in the vicinity of the project site including, but not limited to, project site entry and egress arrangements (including security checks), time limitations for deliveries, use of temporary roads for public traffic, weight restrictions, traffic signals and channeling of vehicles to avoid construction works, access and egress for emergency vehicles, etc.
14.2.14Emergency Response Plan
The necessity for a project-specific emergency response management plan is generally dictated by the constraints of the project, its environs, and industry application area. It is usually developed in conjunction with project sponsors and owners. For example, underground works (such as tunneling) have specific mandatory requirements relating to emergency response needs. Requirements may include, but are not limited to, responsibility and authority for key members of the emergency response team; communication requirements (especially of initial occurrence of emergency incidents, and with emergency service, local hospitals, etc.); provision of appropriate emergency response equipment; and access and egress requirements for emergency response vehicles (fire, police, ambulance, etc.). Emergency responses should not be limited to safety and environmental incidents and can also include environmental emergency incidents, for example, the inadvertent discharge of contaminated material into water courses, which could lead to the contamination of reservoirs. In addition, it is common for application area regulators to require specific mandatory controls to be implemented as part of emergency response activities.
It is prudent to develop an integrated emergency response plan to address both safety and environmental incidents, especially as an emergency incident will directly or indirectly have safety and environmental implications.
14.2.15Permit to Work Management Plan
Many construction project application areas have mandatory requirements relating to permits, for example, excavation, hot work, confined work, biohazards, etc. These permit procedures are defined in the contract conditions, and generally reflect the safety and environmental checks that should be addressed before commencing specific activities. Although the permit to work management plan is a subset of the project communication management plan, the consequences of safety failures warrant its placement in this section. This is especially true where part of the scope of work for a construction project relates to the mitigation measures to deal with contamination originating from adjacent industries.
14.2.16Waste Management Plan
The project waste management plan is a subsidiary of the project management plan. Most construction projects will produce some degree of waste, and some projects will generate significantly more waste than others (e.g., office development versus infrastructure development). Project waste management generally employs the “3R process”—reduce, reuse, recycle—to address environmental management. The project waste management plan details the controls to be applied to each particular category of waste, ranging from general office waste (paper, etc.), food waste (from site canteens), sanitary waste (from site welfare facilities), to the different categories of waste generated by construction processes (excavations, metal, packaging, lumber, etc.).
Requirements for waste management include not only identifying authorized waste disposal facilities, but also obtaining the necessary permits and authorizations to discharge waste, the most common being:
With many construction projects being sited in areas that previously would have been considered unsuitable, environmental management includes information on how to deal with possible contaminated areas. Such contamination includes material considered unsuitable for reuse or recycling, as well as contamination that would constitute an environmental and/or safety and environmental hazard. No further discussion is made regarding this matter here, as it is beyond the scope of this Construction Extension in view of the involvement of local, state, and federal governments; statutory bodies; and industry regulators. It is mentioned here to make performing organizations aware that such instances are common. Additional information can be found in the Government Extension to the PMBOK® Guide [7].
14.2.17Safety and Environmental Programs
While the project safety and environmental management plan details how the performing organization will manage safety and environmental issues on the project, the project safety and environmental monitoring and control plan defines the actual monitoring and control activities to be employed and undertaken, especially:
To be effective, safety and environmental monitoring and control (and verification) should be integrated into how the physical work is performed. This process establishes control points or gates throughout the process to ensure that the next work phase will not proceed until the preceding work has been completed and verified as complete and compliant.
14.3Project HSSE Management Executing
Implementation and assurance of the various HSSE plans occurs during the executing phase of the project by specialized resources as the responsible entity. Applying the planned, systematic HSSE activities to ensure that the project employs all processes needed to meet the requirements and determining whether these processes and their integration are effective is part of this responsibility. Evaluating the results of the HSSE management on a regular basis provides confidence that the project will safely and environmentally satisfy the relevant HSSE standards. Without this assurance, projects not in compliance can incur devastating financial and life-threatening consequences.
14.3.1Project HSSE Assurance
The HSSE plan details how the health, safety, security, and environmental components will be handled. HSSE execution on construction projects includes assuring compliance, analyzing results, and evaluating effectiveness of the plan. These activities provide the means to recognize noncompliance or variance from the project requirements.
HSSE assurance involves:
14.3.1.1Safety and Environmental Audits
Audits involve undertaking structured and independent review to ensure that project activities of the performing organization(s) comply with the project requirements and that such activities are suitable to fulfill the requirements of the project.
Safety and environmental audits of the project product(s) are called technical or compliance audits. For example, road safety audits assess the measures implemented for traffic management, which include an evaluation of results or outputs of activities as compared to the performance and acceptance criteria defined in technical safety and environmental standards and specifications to determine fitness for the purpose intended.
Audits can also be undertaken for the project management system as a whole or for individual component parts (procurement management system, design management system, construction management system, or commissioning management system, etc.). Audits also assess compliance with statutory and legislative safety and environmental requirements.
Integrated audits are commonly adopted to provide a more accurate measure of the effectiveness of a specific work area in fulfilling project requirements. For example, the incorporation of the applicable requirements (such as those for quality, safety, and environmental management), sometimes aligned to global standards as ISO or OHSA, are used to assess the effectiveness of the controls employed on a project as a whole rather than individually.
14.3.1.2Safety and Environmental Hazard Risk Analyses
Safety and environmental hazard risk analyses is a systematic review of each construction process, activity, or work element to identify the potential safety and environmental hazards for project personnel as well as others who are present on the site associated with the activity or process. These analyses are part of the risk identification process and are normally carried out by specific and knowledgeable members of the project management team of the performing organization with the assistance of key construction supervisors.
14.3.1.3Safety and Environmental Assurance Measurements
Safety and environmental assurance measurements are the result of performing safety and environmental assurance activities that are fed back into the Planning Process for use in re-evaluating and analyzing the performance of the performing organization, and the standards and processes employed. Assurance measurements are also used as an indicator of areas that may need further investigation.
14.4Project HSSE Management Monitoring and Controlling
The HSSE monitoring and control describes how the project management team will implement the necessary controlling activities of the performing organization. The monitoring and control may contain or make reference to specific procedures to be employed to ensure the compliance of the work that is carried out, including:
14.4.1Key Performance Indicators
The HSSE management plan includes generally accepted key performance indicators (KPI) for monitoring and controlling, including:
14.4.2Heinrich's Accident Triangle
First developed in the 1930s, Heinrich's Accident Triangle (Figure 14-1) illustrates the generally accepted concept surrounding unsafe behavior. The figure shows the progression and correlation of unsafe acts to eventual fatalities. For every 30,000 unsafe behaviors, 3,000 near misses will occur, 30 lost days of work, and 1 fatality. This concept underlines the importance of reporting and correcting unsafe behavior.
The National Safety Council defines the following terms:
14.4.3Accident Investigation
It is important that each accident or incident is reported immediately and its cause (direct and/or indirect) is investigated. A complete report should be made stating what happened and why to ensure preventive and corrective actions are implemented. The insurance companies covering the resulting losses usually require these reports, but they are also vital for measuring and improving the performing organization's safety and environmental performance. In some cases, the reports are required by law enforcement agencies or government labor agencies. These investigation reports may require cascading changes in SOPs or implementation plans.
14.4.4Defect Repair Review
Although defect repair would generally be considered an attribute of quality management, the review of defects with regard to any potential safety and environmental issues is common. Defect repair review can commonly be addressed by means of the nonconformance control process.