When Standards don't comply A technical standard is an established norm or requirement. It is usually a formal document that establishes uniform engineering or technical criteria, methods, processes and practices, often referred to as ‘good engineering practice’.

There’s usually a lot of good reasons why we try to adopt and follow standards (can you imagine hiring an electrician to wire your new home without following the latest National Electric Standard NEC standards?).  Unfortunately, in our world of process safety understanding how to correctly apply the latest standards isn’t so clear for many.  And in some cases understanding what’s compliant and what’s not is even muddier.
In a recent case that I got personally involved with, there was a requirement that actually complicated the safety solution and resulted in a less than safe design.  How can that be?

Well it can, and often does, when our equipment technology advances ahead of the standard for which it is being specified for.  In this case, the standard hadn’t been updated to recognize some safety equipment offers preconfigured, tested and certified safety techniques that meet the standard’s intended requirement (in this case it was memory corruption).  Unfortunately, the standard was pretty clear on having to add this ‘extra’ external device which only served to complicate the design, increase the nuisance trip rate and overall add more risk.