Closing the SMS gap – assessment, analysis,& strategy

🚨 New Safety Management System (SMS) regulations have arrived—Are you prepared?

Welcome to the first instalment of our three-part series, ‘Spotlight on SMS.’ In this chapter, Stage 1: SMS Gap Assessment, we break down the latest regulatory changes, what they mean for you, and how to stay ahead.

A Gap Assessment is the first crucial step in strengthening your SMS. It will help you:
✅ Assess your organisation’s current SMS status
✅ Uncover weaknesses before they become risks
✅ Develop a targeted strategy to bridge gaps or improve operations

Self-assessments can often be misleading. Many organisations either overestimate their SMS performance or create unnecessary work. That’s where expert guidance makes all the difference.

SQEP’s Subject Matter Expert (SME), @Si Hays, brings the expertise needed to guide you through a structured, accurate assessment—ensuring you focus on what truly matters.

🔍 Coming up next: We’ll cover Stage 2: SMS Consultation and Coaching – the expert guide to strengthening your SMS compliance. Stay tuned!

:::

The SMS Journey

In our recent LinkedIn post regarding the new regulations for Aviation Design, Production and Maintenance organisations, we promised to explore what the new regulations mean for you and how to stay ahead.

So, to answer this we must first confront, head on, the concerns many organisations will have regarding the implementation of a Safety Management System (SMS). Will it mean more meetings, additional duties, hiring more staff, taking time away from producing/delivering and staying profitable?  Well, it all depends on the size, complexity and desire of the organisation to make the SMS work for them. You see, SMS can bring huge business benefits such as higher staff morale, better retention rates, reduced recruitment costs, less time lost interviewing and less disruption to the safety culture. Most importantly, it can identify early any hazards that could lead to safety incidents (and any subsequent legal action) and costs for re-work etc.

SQEP would be unwise to sugarcoat the SMS journey. It’s a fundamental culture change across the business requiring strong and determined leadership, good followership from mid-level management and trust/openness throughout the organisation. Perhaps this already exists in your organisation and leaders regularly welcome ideas for improvement and use varied and successful strategies for improving the safety culture. More often than not however, SQEP has needed to provide well considered strategies and tactics to build trust and change mindsets. We hope this short blog helps readers that are just starting their journey to understand what the change in regulations means to you. It’s nothing to be afraid of, in fact, it’s a wonderful and prosperous journey that brings amazing business benefits whilst also helping to protect the organisation and the customers that use the products, systems and services you provide.

Stage 1: SMS Gap Assessment

The other promise we made was to share with you SQEP’s thoughts on Stage 1 – SMS Gap Assessment, Analysis and Strategy for Improvement:

It doesn’t matter whether you are starting your SMS journey like many Aviation Design, Production or Maintenance organisations, or if your SMS is mature but you are not sure how well your SMS is performing. It makes perfect sense to understand, fully, where you are now. This can be achieved over time through auditing, but SQEP recommends a half-day session with your key stakeholders (normally the Accountable Manager and Senior Leadership Team) to conduct a Gap Assessment (or SMS Diagnostic if your SMS is mature). Most organisations will already have elements of an SMS and will certainly have plenty of meetings in place where senior managers discuss and strategise. A well-orchestrated Gap Assessment will identify what you already have in place (to help your SMS function) and determine how well it is working. Once complete, you can conduct analysis, assess options and create a strategy and a plan to focus on bridging the gaps or improving what you already have.

There are many tools available to help with this process, but SQEP would recommend having someone specially trained and experienced to select the most appropriate tool for your organisation, and to undertake the Gap Assessment. An experienced SMS Consultant will help to prevent wayward estimations during self-scoring which could lead to excessive unnecessary work, but frequently SQEP finds that organisations can be overconfident and overscore during the process, which can then leave the SMS (and therefore the organisation) in an exposed position.

When it comes to the analysis and strategy, which then feeds a correctly prioritised and fully resourced plan, an experienced SMS consultant will understand what can happen if you do things in the wrong order. A few examples are:

• Trying to deliver the SMS key messages to the entire organisation of stopping work if unsure (and about to step outside the box of standards) or reporting something, when the leader and managers throughout the organisation do not fully understand that they must first create the right culture (a Just Culture). The training on Just Culture must be complete for leaders/managers and must be fully understood and embraced by all the leaders within the organisation.
• Asking all staff to report, which can then create a bow-wave of reports, when the organisation does not yet have sufficient ‘human in the system’ trained investigators. This can lead to reports disappearing into what appears to the workforce as a black hole, which can then damage the Reporting Culture.

SQEP offers highly competitive (ridiculously competitive in fact!) rates for helping you start your SMS journey. The Gap Assessment (or Diagnostic for mature organisations) and report containing the results, the strategy and a plan will take approximately 5 working days to complete. An investment that could save you way more in both time and performance if the assessment is not accurate and your plan doesn’t include dodging the pitfalls of SMS implementation.

Interested in discussing your SMS compliance? Get in touch with Si Hays today.

:::

Find out more about SQEP’s capabilities and how we can support your programme requirements here

Follow SQEP on LinkedIn here