ALARP is often presented as a structured, objective process. In reality, every ALARP assessment involves people making judgement calls.
And people change.
Teams are restructured. Experienced personnel retire. Organisations merge. Contractors come and go. Industry conditions shift. The individuals who made a key decommissioning decision three years ago may no longer be around to explain it today.
This creates an often-overlooked challenge: maintaining consistency in ALARP decision-making over the life of a project.
A robust P&A or decommissioning strategy should not depend on who happens to be sitting in the room at the time. It should be embedded within the organisation's operational processes.
By encoding company-specific P&A practices and decision frameworks within DecomX, organisations can ensure that established methodologies continue to be applied consistently, regardless of personnel changes.
The result is greater continuity, reduced variability, and increased confidence that decisions remain aligned with agreed corporate standards.
Because in a constantly changing environment, consistency becomes a risk reduction measure in its own right. If key members of your decommissioning team left tomorrow, would the next team make the same ALARP decisions for the same reasons?
ALARP should never be dependent on individual memory experience, or interpretation alone. By embedding decision logic, historical reasoning, and company-specific methodologies into a repeatable framework, organisations can ensure that ALARP remains consistent, defensible, and auditable throughout the life of a decommissioning project.
That's exactly the challenge DecomX was designed to address.