High Reliability Operations

Advancing organizational reliability / Karlene H. Roberts -- The multiple meanings and models of reliability in organizational research / Rangaraj Ramanujam -- Three lenses for understanding reliable, safe, and effective organizations : strategic design, political, and cultural approaches / John S. Carroll -- Mindful organizing / Kathleen M. Sutcliffe -- Reliability through resilience in organizational teams / Seth A. Kaplan & Mary J. Waller -- How high reliability mitigates organizational goal conflicts / Peter M. Madsen & Vinit Desai -- Organizational learning as reliability enhancement / Peter M. Madsen -- Metaphors of communication in high reliability organizations / Jody L.S. Jahn, Karen K. Myers, & Linda L. Putnam -- Extending reliability analysis across organizations, time, and scope / Paul R. Schulman & Emery Roe -- Organizing for reliability in health care / Peter F. Martelli -- Organizing for reliability in practice : searching for resilience in communities at risk / Louise K. Comfort -- Applying reliability principles : lessons learned / W. Earl Carnes

High Reliability Management is the first book to provide an in-depth and timely look at the people who manage for high reliability--professionals who run critical systems in electricity, water, and transportation. The book tells of the extraordinary challenges that these "reliability professionals" face in ensuring that society's basic systems operate continuously and safely, even in the wake of errors in policy and technical design.

Patient safety and quality of care are critical concerns of healthcare consumers, payers, providers, organizations, health systems, and governments. Although a strong body of knowledge shows that high reliability methods enable the most efficient, safe, and effective care, these methods have yet to be completely implemented across healthcare. According to authors Cynthia Oster and Jane Braaten, nurses—who are on the frontline of providing safe and effective care—are ideally situated to drive high reliability. High Reliability Organizations: A Healthcare Handbook for Patient Safety & Quality, Second Edition, equips nurses and healthcare professionals with the tools necessary to establish an error detection and prevention system. This new edition builds on the foundation of the first book with best practices, relevant exemplars, and important discussions about cultural aspects essential to sustainability. New material focuses on: · High reliability performance during a pandemic · Organizational learning and tiered safety huddles · High reliability in infection prevention and ambulatory care · The emerging field of human factors engineering within healthcare · Creating a virtual resource toolkit for frontline staff

Improve your company's ability to avoid or manage crises Managing the Unexpected, Third Edition is a thoroughly revised text that offers an updated look at the groundbreaking ideas explored in the first and second editions. Revised to reflect events emblematic of the unique challenges that organizations have faced in recent years, including bank failures, intelligence failures, quality failures, and other organizational misfortunes, often sparked by organizational actions, this critical book focuses on why some organizations are better able to sustain high performance in the face of unanticipated change. High reliability organizations (HROs), including commercial aviation, emergency rooms, aircraft carrier flight operations, and firefighting units, are looked to as models of exceptional organizational preparedness. This essential text explains the development of unexpected events and guides you in improving your organization for more reliable performance. "Expect the unexpected" is a popular mantra for a reason: it's rooted in experience. Since the dawn of civilization, organizations have been rocked by natural disasters, civil unrest, international conflict, and other unexpected crises that impact their ability to function. Understanding how to maintain function when catastrophe strikes is key to keeping your organization afloat. Explore the many different kinds of unexpected events that your organization may face Consider updated case studies and research Discuss how highly reliable organizations are able to maintain control during unexpected events Discover tactics that may bolster your organization's ability to face the unexpected with confidence Managing the Unexpected, Third Edition offers updated, valuable content to professionals who want to strengthen the preparedness of their organizations—and confidently face unexpected challenges.

Since the first edition of Managing the Unexpected was published in 2001, the unexpected has become a growing part of our everyday lives. The unexpected is often dramatic, as with hurricanes or terrorist attacks. But the unexpected can also come in more subtle forms, such as a small organizational lapse that leads to a major blunder, or an unexamined assumption that costs lives in a crisis. Why are some organizations better able than others to maintain function and structure in the face of unanticipated change? Authors Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe answer this question by pointing to high reliability organizations (HROs), such as emergency rooms in hospitals, flight operations of aircraft carriers, and firefighting units, as models to follow. These organizations have developed ways of acting and styles of learning that enable them to manage the unexpected better than other organizations. Thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition of the groundbreaking book Managing the Unexpected uses HROs as a template for any institution that wants to better organize for high reliability.

The overwhelming majority of a software system’s lifespan is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So, why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computing systems? In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You’ll learn the principles and practices that enable Google engineers to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient—lessons directly applicable to your organization. This book is divided into four sections: Introduction—Learn what site reliability engineering is and why it differs from conventional IT industry practices Principles—Examine the patterns, behaviors, and areas of concern that influence the work of a site reliability engineer (SRE) Practices—Understand the theory and practice of an SRE’s day-to-day work: building and operating large distributed computing systems Management—Explore Google's best practices for training, communication, and meetings that your organization can use

Normal Accidents analyzes the social side of technological risk. Charles Perrow argues that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety--building in more warnings and safeguards--fails because systems complexity makes failures inevitable. He asserts that typical precautions, by adding to complexity, may help create new categories of accidents. (At Chernobyl, tests of a new safety system helped produce the meltdown and subsequent fire.) By recognizing two dimensions of risk--complex versus linear interactions, and tight versus loose coupling--this book provides a powerful framework for analyzing risks and the organizations that insist we run them. The first edition fulfilled one reviewer's prediction that it "may mark the beginning of accident research." In the new afterword to this edition Perrow reviews the extensive work on the major accidents of the last fifteen years, including Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Challenger disaster. The new postscript probes what the author considers to be the "quintessential 'Normal Accident'" of our time: the Y2K computer problem.