What is COMET?

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The COMET process begins by populating the Significant Investigation Data (SID) Grid, enabling you to focus on uncovering all the relevant facts and data to form the basis of a rigorous investigation. Having identified the incident or problem statement, the investigator builds a timeline supported by data gathered with the help of COMET investigation prompts – evidence gathering checklists covering scene management, equipment failure, documents, personnel and witness interviews.

Understanding the barriers or control measures that are designed to protect your people, assets and reputation is the first step in Barrier Evaluation. Pinpointing barriers or control measures, which failed or were missing, is key to understanding the cause of an incident. 

Understanding adverse change or difference that contributed to the cause of an incident is key in any investigation.  Change Evaluation helps you to focus effort across six key areas where adverse change may have contributed to the failure – people, equipment, time, environment, management  and regime.

COMET Factors are the errors, failures or shortfalls that directly contributed to the incident / performance loss or made its consequences worse. The identification of COMET Factors is pivotal to the accurate selection of root causes. They enable you to identify what went wrong before root causes reveal why things went wrong.

COMET is the first commercially available investigation and root cause analysis methodology to include human factor (HF) analysis. 

When an element of human error directly contributes to an incident / performance loss, COMET’s HF tool helps you to identify the first failure stage, what Performing Influencing Factors (PIFs) contributed to the error and ultimately identify the most appropriate preventive actions.

Root causes are revealed by analysing COMET Factors across COMET’s five unique Root Maps, Communication, Operating environment, Management, Equipment
& Training to discover how each of these organisational areas influenced the incident / performance loss. 

COMET Root Maps help you to pinpoint why things went wrong by guiding you to the most relevant root causes from a pre-defined and coded list of 62.

COMET supports the investigator with a unique set of SMARTER (Specific, Measurable, Accountable, Reasonable / Relevant, Timely, Effective, Reviewed) preventive action prompts for each root cause. Based on years of delivering effective action plans, COMET prompts help you create proportionate and robust preventive action plans.

COMET preventive action prompts provide a spectrum of effective and creative actions designed to achieve both short and long term prevention goals.