04. Safety Management Roles and Responsibilities

Major Roles and Responsibilities in Functional Safety

Everybody on a team would ultimately be responsible for following safety processes no matter their role in the company. Creating and sustaining a safety culture would also be everybody's responsibility; however, if you were a safety manager, then you would be especially interested in ensuring a safety oriented workplace.

Here is a summary of the different roles in a functional safety project

Project Manager

• Overall project management
• Acquires and allocates resources needed for the functional safety activities
• Appoints safety manager or might act as safety manager

Safety Manager

• Planning, coordinating and documenting of the development phase of the safety lifecycle
• Tailors the safety lifecycle
• Maintains the safety plan
• Monitors progress against the safety plan
• Performs pre-audits before the safety auditor

Safety Engineer

• Product development
• Integration
• Testing at the hardware, software and system levels

Safety Auditor

• Ensures that the design and production implementation conform to the safety plan and ISO 26262.
• Must be independent from the team developing the project

Safety Assessor

• Independent judgement as to whether functional safety is being achieved via a functional safety assessment
• Must be independent from the team developing the project

Test Manager

• Plans testing activities
• Coordinates testing to show that the vehicle system works correctly

These are the main management roles in the functional safety lifecycle; there would still be other people involved including requirement engineers, test engineers, hardware engineers, and software engineers.

Note Regarding Defined Roles

ISO defines the program manager and safety manager only. However, use of other roles is one possible implementation, and may vary from company to company.

Quiz: Tailoring the Safety Lifecycle?

Do you remember what tailoring the safety lifecycle means?

What does it mean to "tailor the safety lifecycle"?

You limit your functional safety documentation to the parts of the vehicle that had safety issues during the testing phase.

You limit a functional safety project to specific sections of the ISO standard to save time.

You determine if your product is new or if it is a modification of an existing product. You only focus on the parts of the ISO 26262 standard impacted by the changes.

You do the parts of the ISO standard that you are knowledgable about and then outsource the rest of the work to experts at another company.

SOLUTION:

You determine if your product is new or if it is a modification of an existing product. You only focus on the parts of the ISO 26262 standard impacted by the changes.