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QC 20120508

Organisational reviews are important instruments in the continuous quest for improved performance. In the nuclear field there has been an increasing regulatory interest in organisational performance, because incidents and accidents often point to organisational deficiencies as one of the major precursors. Many methods for organisational reviews have been proposed, but they are mostly based on ad hoc approaches to specific problems. The absence of well-established techniques for organisational reviews has already shown to cause discussions and controversies on different levels. The aim of the OrRe project is to collect the experiences from organisational reviews carried out so far and to reflect them in a theoretical model of organisational performance. Furthermore, the project aims to reflect on the criteria for the definition of the scope and content of organisational reviews. Finally, recommendations will be made for guidance for people participating in organisational reviews. This progress report describes regulatory practices in Finland and Sweden together with some case examples of organizational reviews and assessment in both countries. Some issues of concern are raised and an outline for the next year’s work is proposed. Issues of concern include the sufficient depth of the assessment, the required competence in assessments, data and criteria problems, definition of the boundaries of the system to be assessed, and the necessary internal support and organisational maturity required for successful assessments. Finally, plans for next year's work are outlined., QC 20120515

The nuclear industry and especially the maintenance activities havebeen under various restructuring initiatives in addition to continuousincremental change due to e.g. new technologies, ageing plants,deregulation and the change of generation. These changes have beenexperienced as causing stress and uncertainty among the workers.Also, changes have lead to e.g. lowered sense of control, goalunclarity and lowered sense of personal responsibility over one’swork. Organizational changes clearly are issues that have potentialeffects on safety. Both positive and negative cases on safety effectsof organizational changes exist, and various accidents have beenpinpointed to organizational changes in the company. In this reportthe challenges of management of change at nuclear power plants areconsidered mainly from organizational culture -perspective. Thecultural perspective taken in this paper strives to combine technicalapproaches to human resources approaches. The report focuses onevidence gathered from studies made at Nordic NPP maintenanceunits, but the results and models depicted in the report are of generalrelevance in the nuclear industry. The report is based on four casestudies of reorganizing in NPP maintenance units and on a literaturereview of change management at various other safety criticalorganizations. The report presents a framework for consideringorganizational changes and their safety consequences., QC 20120525

This study aims to characterize and assess the organizational cultures of two Nordic nuclear power plant (NPP) maintenance units. The research consisted of NPP maintenance units of Forsmark (Sweden) and Olkiluoto (Finland). The study strives to anticipate the consequences of the current practices, conceptions and assumptions in the given organizations to their ability and willingness to fulfill the organizational core task. The methods utilized in the study were organizational culture and core task questionnaire (CULTURE02) and semi-structured interviews. Similarities and differences in the perceived organizational values, conceptions of one's own work, conceptions of the demands of the maintenance task and organizational practices at the maintenance units were explored. The maintenance units at Olkiluoto and Forsmark had quite different organizational cultures, but they also shared a set of dimensions such as strong personal emphasis placed on safety. The authors propose that different cultural features and organizational practices may be equally effective from the perspective of the core task. The results show that due to the complexity of the maintenance work, the case organizations tend to emphasize some aspects of the maintenance task more than others. The reliability consequences of these cultural solutions to the maintenance task are discussed. The authors propose that the organizational core task, in this case the maintenance task, should be clear for all the workers. The results give implications that this has been a challenge recently as the maintenance work has been changing. The concepts of organizational core task and organizational culture could be useful as management tools to anticipate the consequences of organizational changes., QC 20120313

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