The organizational license. $200, once, and it is yours to hand out to your employees and students on your training courses.
 
On the night of July 6, 1988, every control on Piper Alpha existed on paper. A permit-to-work procedure, a safety manual, a safety department, a daily check, a corporate audit, a regulator's inspection. An assessor who asked whether the controls were in place would have been told yes, and shown the documents. One hundred and sixty-seven people died.
 
That is the pattern, not the exception. Most control failures that reach a public inquiry are failures of capability, or of feedback, wearing a policy disguise, and an assessment that reads the paperwork will rate them effective.
 
This book sets out a method that sees through the disguise. The organizational license puts it in the hands of everyone in your organization who needs it.
 
What you are buying
 
Not a copy. The right to give out copies.
One payment of $200 buys your organization a perpetual license to the A4 PDF edition. Give it to every employee. Put it on your intranet or your learning management system behind a login. Print it. Hand it to everyone who attends your training courses, paid or free, as part of the course materials.
No seat count. No renewal. No expiry. Buy it once and it stays yours.
 
The method
 
A control is effective when it is well designed, the people who run it are able to run it, and someone is checking that it runs and learning when it does not. Rate each of those three on a five-level scale with published descriptors, take the lowest as the rating of the control, and report all three.
 
That is the method in one sentence. The book is what it takes to apply it so that two assessors, given the same evidence, reach the same answer.
The PAC scale. Three pillars, five levels, full descriptors, and the lowest-of-three rule. Never the average.
Criteria libraries for eight families of control, and how to write a criterion that can actually be tested.
The ladder of evidence, from assertion to documentation to practice. An assertion is a lead. Practice is proof.
Findings by the 4Cs, recommendations by the 4As, and reports written for three different readers.
Self-assessment treated as the same method with a different assessor, including the psychology of self-rating and the calibration gap.
Piper Alpha and Wells Fargo, assessed in full against the inquiry record, cited paragraph by paragraph.
Templates, calibration exercises with answer notes, a glossary, and sources by chapter.
Written for risk and audit practitioners, and for students who want depth rather than an overview.
 
What the license allows, in plain words
 
You may
Give the PDF to every employee, officer and contractor. No limit on copies.
Hold it on an internal network, intranet or LMS behind a login.
Print hard copies for your own people and for those attending your training.
Include it, complete and unaltered, in the materials for courses you deliver, whether or not you charge for them.
Quote from it in your internal and training material, with attribution.
 
You may not
Sell it, sublicense it, or supply it as a product in its own right.
Publish it on the public internet or any open content or course marketplace.
Remove the license page or the license line in the footer.
Use it as training data for a machine-learning model.
 
And the people you give it to may keep it and use it for their own professional work, but may not pass it on or sell it. The full license is bound into the front of the book and repeated at the back, so nobody has to go looking for it.
 
If you want more than one book
 
The SRMBOK organizational library license is an annual subscription covering the whole SRMBOK library for your organization: more than seventy books, templates, guides, checklists and assessment tools, including the editable formats you can put your own logo on.
 
It covers this book in both PDF and EPUB, so your people can read it on a phone, a tablet or a Kindle as well as at a desk, and it covers everything new and revised that we release while your subscription runs.
 
 
 
Prefer a printed copy?
 
Also available as a paperback and for Kindle on Amazon, for individual readers.
 
 
The file
 
A4 PDF, 227 pages. Twenty-three chapters and six appendices, 151 numbered sections, 12 tables and 8 figures. Every factual claim about a real organization, inquiry or standard carries an endnote to a primary or authoritative source, 259 of them in all. Set for reading on screen and for printing single sided.