Managing Functional Safety (ISO26262) in Projects

The ISO 26262 standard for functional safety was first released in 2011 and has been widely incorporated by most OEMs and Tier1 suppliers. The design and conformance of the product to functional safety standards is strongly intertwined with the product development cycle and needs to be carefully managed. The consideration for functional safety needs to begin right from the product’s concept phase through engineering and production and finally decommissioning. The application of the standard in a project can bring significant challenges especially to managers who are relatively new to the standard. This paper provides some guidelines on the key tasks involved in managing ISO26262 in projects and some ways to approach them. The paper is expected to help managers manage ISO26262 compliant projects. The paper also tries to come up with a metric that can be used for resource estimation for implementing ISO26262 in projects.